


The Battlefield

by rhythmickorbit



Series: From Spark to Sky [1]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: A TON of exposition in this one, Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Beginnings, Bonding, Crime, Doctors & Physicians, Empurata, Exposition, Friendship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Monsters, Pilots, Plants, Platonic Relationships, Possession, Post-War, Space Ships, Team Bonding, Travel, Violence, Zombies, grumpy old man, plant zombies, questionable medical choices, questionable science, science fiction shenanigans, science? logic? what's that, unliscensed doctor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-10
Updated: 2019-12-23
Packaged: 2020-11-15 06:54:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 9
Words: 21,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20862062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rhythmickorbit/pseuds/rhythmickorbit
Summary: When the veteran Port and the runaway Sunshift pass through a malfunctioning space bridge, they find themselves crash-landed on a planet torn apart by the Cybertronian civil war. With no one to contact and a broken ship, it's almost impossible to guarantee survival, especially when hunger runs through the rock and dust of the very planet they walk on.





	1. A Bumpy Ride

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Two vagabonds crash on an unknown planet. Port gets mad. Sunshift discovers the harsh realities of death.

A million specks of light consumed her vision. A million little bits of beauty that she had never had the chance to see before, save from an informational vid here and descriptions from a novel there. Sunshift’s optics sparkled as she stared at the screen displaying the view outside. Her spark swelled, and the last, miniscule string of anxiety about her choice burned away, incinerated by the stars consuming her thoughts.

“Can you believe how amazing this is?” she beamed, and turned her joyful gaze toward the pilot-- her unwitting savior. Port, he was called, although he had never actually told her that. Sunshift saw it carved into the wall of the ship, and since he was the only mecha here, it would stand to reason that it was his name. Obviously. He didn’t say much, glaring at her whenever she spoke. He did the same now, working optic side-eyeing her in contempt as Sunshift spun around and around in the co-pilot’s chair.

“I’ve never been anywhere off-planet before! Or anywhere on-planet, really! I’ve never seen anything interesting before! I wonder what the space bridge will be like. I can’t wait to talk to everyone. Have you ever met any organics? I’ve always wanted to! I hope we meet some soon.”

“I hope so too, so I can leave you with them. Forever. And you never speak to me again.” Port adjusted some vaguely important looking switches, and the ship bucked forward as it picked up speed. Sunshift squeaked in surprise at the change, but Port appeared completely unruffled. Sunshift lifted her wings in an attempt to regain her balance.

“Do you think we’ll go to a planet, soon?” Sunshift chirped, ignoring the obvious rudeness of Port’s previous comment. “I hope we do. Do we need fuel? We should get fuel at a planet— hey what’s that?” Sunshift waved her hand wildly at the screen in front of the control console.

The structure displayed curved and twisted into an arc-like form. It glowed with a soft energy, as if it were a dying ember. Another ship swerved in front of the shuttle and dove into the opening, then disappearing in a small flash of light. Sunshift’s optics rounded in wonder.

“That’s a space bridge,” Port grunted. “We’ll be going through several of them to get to your destination.” 

“Wow! That’s amazing! I wonder how it works and what it feels like and--” Sunshift lost track of her own words as she jabbered, lost in the familiar maze of her own vocalizations. The tiny shuttle picked up speed again, diving and dipping around the debris floating in the space around them. Port steered the shuttle toward the space bridge, faster, faster, and suddenly swooping into the arc with pinpoint accuracy. 

Sunshift wondered how he did that with only one optic. Her rumination was cut off, however, with a burst of color and light filling her vision. Or was it the lack thereof? She couldn’t tell for sure. The shuttle shook and vibrated, and Port yelled something. He sounded panicked.

He reached over Sunshift’s head, pulled a switch, and shook his helm. He faced her, and yelled something else about the engine. Engine? Sunshift didn’t know anything about that. Sunshift stared at him in confusion. Was this abnormal for a space bridge?

Port whipped his helm back around to face the screen in front of them. The colors had vanished, revealing the emptiness of space once more. Space junk floated steadily around them, and Port desperately jerked the steering to and fro in order to avoid it. Several loud noises indicated that he was not entirely successful.

The shuttle shuddered and shook. Sunshift held onto the edges of her seat with desperation, and her wings shot out once more for balance. Pain shot through her left wing as it hit Port in the face. Port turned and yelled at her again. Sunshift yelled something smart and witty and helpful back at him. The shuttle didn’t stop.

Oh, a planet! Sunshift pointed at it excitedly, but fell face-first onto the console after letting go of her hold on the seat. The planet was gray in color, and barely any clouds swirled on its surface as the shuttle continued to arc straight towards it.

“Slag slag slag slag slag,” Port howled, holding onto the console as a lifeline. The shuttle, now completely out of control, was grasped by the hand of the planet’s orbit. It spun for awhile, and Sunshift hit the top of her helm on something hard and metallic-sounding. Sound echoed, sound was not real and it was getting really warm inside of the shuttle now and something did not smell right.

Port’s face was contorted in a mixture of panic and anger. The anger part was just his face, Sunshift figured. Something clanged really loudly in the back of the shuttle and that definitely wasn’t normal and the screen was now shattered from something flying into it, and the air grew warm, warmer, almost unbearably so as they fell, they were definitely falling but directions were a lie.

Sunshift offlined her optics, telling herself that this was a much, much better way to die than in Chargerender’s hands.

Impact, than lifting again. Impact. Air. Impact. And then… Nothing.

“Wow, bumpy ride!” Sunshift exclaimed without hesitation, once her surroundings stopped vibrating and her audials cleared from the initial noise of the collision.

As inertia had run out, additional parts in the back of the shuttle had grown loose, and they fell to the floor with a deafening clang. Sunshift could smell the faintest scent of ozone in the air from when the motor definitely exploded, even though she had never seen a motor explode. Was this what it smelled like?

Port shoved a fallen chunk of ceiling off of his chassis. He glared at Sunshift, dead optic glinting with annoyance as the brighter, living one scrutinized her. “We almost burned up in the fragging atmosphere.” his vocalizer deepened to an almost-growl. “I would say that it was something like that.” He shook his helm in frustration, and stood on shaking legs. He stumbled toward Sunshift’s side of the cockpit, and Sunshift noted that the wiring of his twisted leg was exposed. Her intake screwed up beneath her mouthplate in concern. Before she could say anything about it, Port interrupted her thoughts with a gruff inquiry. 

“Where in Primus’ name are we?” His optics narrowed in frustration, and he made an unsteady effort to shove Sunshift aside. “What are our coordinates?”

Unfortunately, that display had been smashed in the crash. Definitely in the crash. And not when Sunshift had accidentally tripped upon entering the cockpit for the first time. Certainly not when she jammed her elbows into the control panel in order to regain her balance. 

“We don’t... have those. They’re out of fashion,” Sunshift said innocently, pointing to the incoherent mess that had somehow appeared on the panel. Apparently, that had been important. She filed away that particular tidbit for the future.

The glare was back again. “Not only are we stranded,” Port limped back to his side of the cockpit in disgust, catching himself on the wall before he fell over, “we are stranded without knowing where we are, how we got here, and who we could possibly contact. I wasn’t this desperate.” Sunshift assumed that the last remark was aimed at Port himself and not her, as he put his helm in his hands after that. She was pretty sure that meant that he blamed himself. And her. She definitely knew that he blamed her.

“Well, um, not all is lost!” Sunshift’s wings lifted slightly as she tried to perk things up a bit. “We know that it can’t be too far from the colony. We were only flying for a few cycles, correct?” She glanced at Port to confirm. 

He kept staring at the control panel. Rude.

“Okay, well,” Sunshift continued, “I have a teensy bit of information about the planets in the system. I stole it... I mean I borrowed it just for survival purposes and also out of spite kinda, and also I thought the ride would be boring. Maybe if I go outside, I could figure it out? We know that the planet’s gray-ish, anyway. How many planets could possibly be that gray-ish?”

“Every other fringe planet that the war hit,” Port’s grumble was muffled, as he turned away from Sunshift. 

“Okay, well! I’m gonna go outside, and then I can come back in and maybe help your leg a bit if you wanna stay in here and recuperate? That should probably make you less of a grump-- I mean!” Sunshift’s wings fluttered as she rushed to correct herself. “Make you feel better, that’s what I meant to say!”

“Primus, please kill me,” Port said. Sunshift took that as a yes. 

She folded her wings down in order to fit in the (slightly squished) cockpit doorway. The door opened with reasonable ease, but the hallway was clearly going to be an interesting challenge. Wires and slabs of metal, as well as caved-in walls, criss-crossed the area on every side, making it difficult for any bot, even one Sunshift’s size, to make it through unscathed. Sunshift ex-vented and hopped over the first clump of wires. She ducked and dodged and only clipped her wing on an especially pointy shard of metal sticking out of the wall.

“I made it!” Sunshift called at Port.

He said something that sounded like “I don’t care”.

Despite the nature of her companion, Sunshift’s wings twitched enthusiastically at the thought of stepping onto unknown soil. She had only ever been two places-- Chargerender’s ship, and that tiny, stupid outpost. There could be things to discover and record and new people to talk to! Oh, her spark soared at the last possibility. It danced through her circuitry like a strong shot of engex (if she had ever been allowed to have it). 

“I’ll be back!” Sunshift shot over her left wing, and pulled down the lever that controlled the hatch leading outside. Port’s response was muffled and incoherent, but was probably just as grumpy as they generally were.

Sunshift felt more than a little concern at the hesitation shown by the stubborn door, but it eventually acquiesced to the order given by the lever and opened. The exit ramp unfurled, and promptly fell to the rocky ground with a loud clunk. Ooh, the ground was gray! Well okay, that was to be expected of the gray-ish planet. But still, how exciting was that? Sunshift flounced down the ramp, her wings raised in hope...

Oh, wow. Port hadn’t been kidding about that war stuff. Corpses were strewn everywhere. Some of them were gouged open already, spark chambers or tanks or circuits torn out, and energon, long dried up, pooled on the ground. Optics wide, Sunshift stepped out of the ship’s shadow. This… wasn’t what she thought of when she pictured the universe. It made her spark sink and her tanks churn. This was far more cruel, far more like her previous life than Sunshift had really bargained for.

Her spark both soared with excitement and plummeted with grief. Sunshift bent down and examined one of the bodies, whose optics were forever open in a pleading stare. Sunshift’s tanks churned with a faint nausea, and she gently shuttered the dead ‘bot’s optics. “I didn’t know this many ‘bots could die at once,” she said out loud and moved to another corpse. Their legs had been severed from the torso by what Sunshift assumed to be some kind of ion blast. Not that she was an expert or anything-- but the memory of that one datapad labeled “Autopsy Reports for IDIOTS-- Never Be Ignorant About How Murder Happens Again” flashed through her processor. 

The title and wording could have used some work in that particular piece, Sunshift thought as she knelt down at the next corpse. Wow, this guy didn’t even have a jawplate anymore. 

“That must have hurt,” Sunshift told the dead mech sympathetically. She wondered what it was like when alive and a thinking, feeling person. Would they have been friendlier than Port? Kinder than Chargerender? Maybe they liked to read obscure data files, too. Maybe they hated medical-grade energon and liked to study organics and liked to dissect things, too.  
Okay, Sunshift, you’re projecting, Sunshift scolded herself. She shook her helm and moved on and on and on, kneeling by each corpse with the same reverence that she saw people at the colony treat that statue of Primus. She shuttered optics when she could and flipped the body over when she couldn’t. Sunshift didn’t want them to look at her, however ludicrous that sounded. She couldn’t stand the empty gaze that reminded her so much of the patients that she and Chargerender often saw to. Sunshift’s wings shuddered at the very notion.  
Still, though, Sunshift couldn’t deny the sorrow that permeated her frame. What was this important that so many sparks had been snuffed out at once? Sunshift almost felt affronted by this-- that was more people that she would never get to talk to.

With that thought in mind, Sunshift continued her rounds, circling around the ship once and then expanding her reach further. She hoped that Port was recharging, at least. That would help his wounds better than anything she could do herself. She brushed the dust off of another dead ‘bot’s face and was about to flip them over. That was when she saw the sprout.

It was a bright turquoise, a common color for the plant life in this system (Sunshift had read about this only a few dozen cycles ago). Despite the devastation around it, the plant seemed to be doing fine-- thriving, actually. Sunshift’s vents hitched as she leaned in closer to the sprout. What did it feed off of? The ground certainly wasn’t all that fertile. She glanced about, sifted through the rock-hard soil-- oh, it was soil, albeit packed in by pedes and wheels and alt-modes in the heat of a battle. Sunshift’s wings raised with newfound giddiness as she shoved the corpse aside. Sorry, friend, the living ones will take priority now.

“I won’t let anything happen to you, little one,” she told the sprout. It seemed to sway in the dusty breeze blowing through-- wind! Sunshift jumped to her pedes and glanced at the gloomy, gray sky. The planet, it seemed, continued to breathe, even after its skin had been ravaged so. With apologies to the corpses, Sunshift managed to gather several scraps of metal that were fence-like enough to guard the little planet. In truth, it was just a bunch of rusted arms-- a macabre fence, to be sure, but a functional one nonetheless. She stared down at the sprout. The sorrow for the lost sparks had evolved into something else-- a hope for a mass grave. 

Sunshift glanced around the battlefield, returning to the eerie feelings of both solitude and being observed by dead optics. With one last glance at her sprout and a verbal assurance of her return, Sunshift rushed back to the ship to tell Port.

Wait, what planet _was_ this? She should probably figure that out before Port ripped his solar panels off in his inevitable frustration.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First reformatted and edited chapter of the bunch! Stay tuned for more!
> 
> Also: formatting on AO3 is a bitch


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sunshift finds a new friend. Port fixes a ship.

The way back was longer than Sunshift initially thought, and she was pleasantly surprised at how much ground had been covered by her own two legs. The perimeter around the ship was now blissfully absent from dead, empty optics, and Sunshift felt her optimism renewed as she flounced into the ship.

The entryway had not been cleared yet. Sunshift’s thoughts wandered back to the twisted metal and exposed wiring of Port’s leg, and she came to the conclusion that much of the hard labor would be done by her. This train of thought also led to a small, bumpy patch of guilt, where Sunshift realized that she had put the shiny hopes of exploring over the equally important task of making sure that her friend-- no,  _ shipmate _ \-- didn’t fall unconscious because of the pain in his limb.

“Port!” Sunshift called, breathless as she clambered over and under fallen rubble toward the cockpit. “Pooooort, I found something neat! And  _ also _ don’t walk on your leg because it’ll hurt really bad, and I’m fairly certain it might fall off but also that probably won’t happen that was a thing called a  _ hyperbole _ . That’s what  _ humans _ call it!” She reached the cockpit’s doorway upon finishing her sentence.

The cockpit, unlike the desecrated hall, looked entirely more livable. Anything that had been taken apart had its components piled into neat little stacks, which was absolutely  _ adorable. _ Silly Port, didn’t he know that  _ messes _ were so much easier to navigate?

Port, for his part, was laying on the floor, underneath of the gutted control panel. Sunshift heard the buzzing of one of his tools, and she waited in the door patiently for him to emerge from his electrical cave. Her wings twitched downward with impatience as she  _ waited  _ and  _ waited  _ and come  _ on  _ Port, don’t you know your  _ leg _ is about to  _ fall off _ ?

Port ceased his work and emerged from the undercroft, optic ridges raised at Sunshift’s obvious impatience. 

“You do know,” he said. “I have only been under there for  _ two kliks _ since you came running through the ship?”

“Seemed longer,” Sunshift dismissed. “How’s the leg feel?”

“Hurts,” grunted Port. “If you aren’t going to say anything useful--  _ what are you doing?. _ ”

While Port was wasting time being grumpy and overall not helpful, Sunshift had bent down, grabbed his leg and began to examine the twisted metal. Her optics widened in sympathy-- the joint looked stiff not to mention exposed. The impact from the crash had rendered all the apparent efforts to repair the injury wasted, and Sunshift felt give in the mending seams as she pushed on his leg.

“Did you ever consider getting a new one?” she asked curiously. “I’m  _ reasonably _ sure that they can do that. I’ve seen it.”

“Don’t need to. Don’t  _ want  _ to,” Port grumbled, his face contorted in discomfort. “If you’re  _ quite  _ finished, I have to figure out what the frag is wrong with the ship’s damn circuits.” He made a futile effort to wiggle his leg out of Sunshift’s grasp.

“It’s  _ important _ to be able to walk, it’s how you get around.” Sunshift stared at Port. He was even more of a mystery than Sunshift had first thought. “Plus, how are you going to help me take those old ships outside apart if you can’t move without twisting your face and squinting your optics with pain? You can’t lie to me.” She leaned closer, optics wide in mock-sincerity. “I’m an unlicensed doctor.”

Port snorted through his vents with dry, half-amusement. “You saw abandoned ships out there?” The subject change was abrupt, obvious, and tactless, but Sunshift’s spark glowed with the sound. So, Port  _ did _ have a sense of humor. That raised him up on Sunshift’s official scale of people that she liked.

...That wasn’t saying much. Sunshift could only really say that she knew about five people, and that wasn’t including Port. He was a lot higher than Chargerender would ever be, though. Sunshift nodded enthusiastically at his comment after a moment of pondering this.

“Yeah, lotsa crashed warships and a lot of gray dirt and rocks and stuff and _goodness _there were _tons_ _and_ _tons_ of dead bodies_. _Did you even know that many people could die at once? Could a bot _know _that many people at once? That war thing you talked about is no joke huh and you should probably close your intake ‘cause a scraplet might crawl in!” Sunshift poked Port’s face with one digit, her helm tilted to the side with curiosity. 

Port closed his intake and rubbed the ridge of his olfactory sensor. “So, we  _ are  _ on a battlefield planet,” he said grimly. Emotions that Sunshift couldn’t pinpoint flashed through his face in a nanoklik.

“Is that bad?” Sunshift asked tentatively. “You’re acting like it’s bad.”

“Yes, but no. Battlefield planets are  _ dead _ planets. There’s no life here, and there never will be again, unless you count the scavengers that populate these places,” Port sighed heavily. “There are plenty of spare parts around, provided that the  _ scavengers _ ,” Port spat the word out like a curse, “Have already desecrated every body and ship on the surface.”

“You’re wrong,” Sunshift pointed out.

“About  _ what? _ ”

“About the dead part. The planet’s not  _ dead _ , really. I mean, all of those people on the ground are, but the  _ planet _ isn’t. I saw an organic growing just outside!” Sunshift’s optics brightened. “Oh, Port, it’s incredible, you should come see--”

“I’m  _ not _ going out there,” Port cut her off with a harsher edge to his voice than before. He reset his vocalizer after a brief static interruption. “I mean, I’m not going out there unless we  _ try _ to get our communications systems working.” He shot a glare at the control panel. “If they  _ ever _ did on this piece of junk.”

“Oh, okay.” Sunshift’s optics flickered with curiosity at the sudden tiredness that seemed to come over Port’s systems. After running through her options, she decided on the one that involved not bothering him and not getting yelled at  _ again. _ “What kind of stuff do you need?” Her wings flipped upward at the prospect of more exploring. “I could try to find some for you. And maybe there’s energon stores still left on those old warships. They’re really big, you know,” she added matter-of-factly.

Port squinted. “I suppose,” he said begrudgingly, “that you’re right, in that case. No harm in looking. Fetch me a datapad, would you?”

Sunshift more than happily complied with that, beginning a sequence of shuffling and turning over rubble in the hall that successfully turned up several blank datapads. She handed it to Port promptly.

Port evaluated the piles of parts with a trained eye and jotted down the names of the parts that he would need. He paused before handing the pad to Sunshift, proceeding to add one or two sketches with the accompanying stylus.

“For the love of Primus,” Port said, handing the datapad to Sunshift. “Don’t get killed.”

“I won’t!” Sunshift chirped, grabbing the datapad and waving her wings for emphasis. “I’m good at not being killed!” Although, being killed  _ would  _ be interesting to write about in a report or a study. Sunshift would read that!

Sunshift had to admit to herself that she would read  _ anything  _ though.

“Anyway!” Sunshift grinned beneath her mouthplate despite herself. “I’m off!” And she was back down the hallway, back down the ramp, and back on the gray landscape.

Sunshift tucked the datapad in her subspace for safekeeping, and scanned the skyline. There was nothing, except the crimson sun in the distance and the gray sky continuing forever. She could make out the tiniest ship-like shapes on the distant rock formations, and one laying on its side not one cycle’s travel away. 

She decided to visit the closer vessel, for convenience sake.

Port seemed to want her back with reasonable speed, right? So, this was an emergency? Sunshift’s processor scanned the reasons  _ not  _ to switch to her alt-mode in an instant.

Chargerender wasn’t  _ here.  _ She never would be again.

Sunshift activated a function that she hadn’t used in an interminable amount of time, and her body shifted. It flowed naturally, only stalling when Sunshift began to panic. Was she doing this right? Was it supposed to be this easy? Chargerender said that it  _ hurt _ !

Gradually, though, she relaxed into the process. Her body was sleeker now, designed purely for flight rather than stance.

_ Okay, here goes nothing, I suppose. _

Sunshift activated her engines, and burst into the sky before she was even ready. She faltered, afraid of falling initially, but her fear was replaced with  _ exhilaration. _

_ _ For once in her life, her energy was totally focused on this singular effort. Her attention was centered, and Sunshift felt a focus that she hadn’t been able to achieve since she had attended to her organic-related projects back at the Chargerender’s facility. She cried into the empty air, shouting without a care in the world as to who heard her. Why didn’t everyone do this? Oh, wait, they did, but  _ most _ bots were  _ allowed  _ to and  _ wow _ the air beneath her wings was so refreshing and Sunshift shouted again at the surface below.  _ I’m here, _ she tried to implore.  _ I’m here and you’re here and wow this is great, I’m sorry you guys are dead! _

Oh, wow, that fallen warship was  _ right there  _ now! Sunshift’s pleasant surprise was soured with the realization that she had to descend and, ultimately, no longer savor the freedom that the sky had so politely afforded her. Oh, well. Sullenly, she aimed toward the ground and shifted out of her alt-mode.

_ Nope, too early, too awkward—  _ Sunshift plummeted from the air and fell flat on her face. She was pretty sure that she heard the glass of her cockpit crack.  _ That  _ was going to be a nuisance to fix. 

Sunshift laid on the ground for awhile. Her face hurt, and she wanted to pretend for a klik that this was something that could be remedied by lying on said ground.

Okay, time to get up.

Sunshift got to her pedes unsteadily. The wrecked warship loomed in front of her, practically gutted and useless. 

Actually, now that Sunshift had a closer look, it looked much… smaller than she had initially thought. Smaller than the ship that she and Port had crashed. Well, she had to start  _ somewhere. _

_ “I’ll bet you can’t find my secrets,” _ it seemed to mock.

“You’re stupid,” Sunshift replied out loud. “I’m going to take a bunch of parts out of you.”

The ship didn’t reply, so Sunshift set upon finding a way into the mid-sized, box-shaped ship. As she circled it, she realized that the ship itself wasn’t meant for long periods of travel-- it wasn’t nearly as sleek as the giants that Sunshift had spotted in the distance earlier. Sunshift questioned whether the vessel was worth her time.

Upon coming around to the front, Sunshift noted that the vessel’s front hatch had been, essentially, crumpled. The opening was more than large enough for Sunshift to duck through, and, taking care not to make too much noise, Sunshift slipped into the shuttle.

The comforting sound of the wind was muffled while inside, and the interior seemed to stretch on in an infinite expanse of dark. A cloud of some sort of flaky substance plumed from where Sunshift’s pedes hit the floor, and she shuddered to think what fluids had been spilled when this thing had crashed. In an attempt to let more light into the space, she tried to shove the hatch behind her off of its hinges.

It worked a bit too well, the slab of metal crashing onto the rocky surface outside and sending a haunting, echoing  _ clang  _ through the air. Sunshift winced, offlining her optics for a moment in order to regain her composure(if she had any in the first place).

Well, this wasn’t pleasant, but not entirely unexpected. A crush of bodies were shoved into the front end of the shuttle, presumably dead from the impact. The frames of these bots were twisted, limbs and innards impaling the corpse next to them in some kind of grisly embrace. Sunshift’s intake screwed up a little in disgust when she realized that the substance on the floor was long-dried energon. 

The silence surrounding her did nothing to ease the pounding of her spark as she examined the surrounding area for anything even faintly resembling the drawings that Port had given her. It appeared as though she would have to gut the inside of this thing before even  _ attempting  _ to find such parts…

Her train of thought was interrupted. Piercing the unbearable silence was a small, almost imperceptible shuffling sound. It echoed through the deathly quiet, and now that Sunshift was paying attention, she could detect the sounds of tiny, heaving vents, and tiny clicks of a glitching vocalizer.

The tiniest twitching. A movement, easily missed in the dim light. The pile of bodies in the back corner moved a little. Sunshift instinctively scrambled back, every other subprocessor in her system begging her to go away, that moving, dead bodies were  _ absolutely not normal. _

Curiosity, as it tended to do, overrode this basic survival protocol. Sunshift shuffled toward the corpses on shaking legs, and hauled each off of the pile one by one. They fell to the ground in a jarring display of gravity, and Sunshift couldn’t explain what it was that made her jump each time one made impact. Their strange, flat-shaped helms flopped about, and Sunshift’s spark ached to know why they looked so odd. Her attention soon turned, however, to the smallest figure, which lay beneath the crush of corpses.

A quivering minibot, or, rather, what was left of him. He had the oddly shaped helm and claws as well, but his optic kept flickering on and off, off and on as he seemed to be trying to make some semblance of his surroundings. Lesions from impact scored the little one’s armor, and the front of his chassis had been effectively torn off, revealing the mech’s faintly flickering spark....

...and something else. Tiny, turquoise-colored tendrils wrapped around what was left of the mech’s spark chamber, and a shard of…  _ something _ was expertly impaled in the soft metal around it. Sunshift squinted, spark burning with curiosity as she reached to poke the tendrils--

But she withheld the temptation in the end. The little ‘bot was quivering with pain, and memories of Chargerender’s patients consumed Sunshift’s processor as she looked upon him with a soft sympathy. He reminded her of something hazy, something that she couldn’t  _ quite _ bring to the front of her memory.

Sunshift shook her helm quickly to rid herself of her light-headedness and bent down. She carefully slid her arms underneath of the small mech, and picked him up. As she did so, she noted that more, larger tendrils of that same turquoise hue snapped away from his body. He was also, surprisingly, very light. 

_ Probably because he already lost most of his weight, _ Sunshift pondered, examining the small thing’s feeble frame. For all intents and purposes, this mech should be long dead. After all, it had been… awhile since this planet had been a battlefield. A long while. At least, Sunshift was  _ fairly _ sure. She would have to ask Port about that point. Nonetheless, even if the battle had been yesterday, energon should have long dried up in the little ‘bot’s system. 

Sunshift poked him in the side, just to double check that she hadn’t been imagining things. A soft groan of pain, static-filled and weak emerged from the minibot’s vocalizer.

Cool!  _ Not _ dead then, if that was anything to go by!

Even so, Sunshift hesitated for a moment upon leaving the shuttle. Port surely wouldn’t be too pleased that Sunshift had further halted their ship’s repairs by finding a half-dead minibot, and resources were strained as it was… On the other hand, Sunshift couldn’t very well  _ leave  _ him there. Not with how much he reminded her of Chargerender’s methods. Her grip tightened around the minibot in her arms, and a small surge of protectiveness flowed through her circuits. With whatever resources she had at her disposal, Sunshift would most certainly keep this little one alive.

There was just the walk back to the ship to worry about. Well, that was fine. Perfectly fine. It wasn’t like Sunshift had wanted to fly back or anything.

She began the trek through the dusty landscape, in what she assumed was the rough approximation of where Port and the ship were. The minibot twitched occasionally, and the only distraction that Sunshift could seem to find as she walked across the  _ really boring  _ and  _ gray _ and  _ pretty much flat _ plain was counting how many times the ‘bot had twitched in pain. 

The sound of crunching echoed in the empty space behind them. Sunshift glanced back at the shuttle, which was but a small boxy shape in the distance. It had fallen over, and tiny, turquoise shapes speckled its surface.

By the time Sunshift arrived back at the crash site, the crimson sun had begun to give way to a deep, violet-black sky. Sunshift picked her way over the corpses, occasionally stepping on a limb due to the limited visibility. Whenever this happened, Sunshift winced a little bit and mumbled an apology to the dead bot, though she knew very well that they couldn’t hear her.

When Sunshift entered the ship, she found that the passageway connecting the different quarters had been, for the most part, cleaned up. Port, despite his mangled leg, was apparently very maneuverable. And strong, although with how large his frame was that part made a lot of sense.

“Port!” Sunshift called, her voice taking on a metallic timbre as it bounced off of the walls. “Port, I didn’t get any of the parts that you needed and I’m sorry about that but please can you make some kind of set up for someone that’s really sick because I have a living minibot here and I think he’s about to be dead!”

Port emerged from the cockpit, his face contorted into a scowl. “I can’t understand you when you talk all at once like that,” he grumbled, but stopped when he saw the limp minibot in Sunshift’s arms. “Primus, Sunshift,” he snapped. “Don’t bring  _ corpses _ in here! What’s  _ wrong _ with you?”

“No, no, he’s alive, see?” Sunshift pointed at the exposed spark chamber. “See, his spark is still a-humming! Kind of.”

“He won’t be alive for much longer. Just… put him outside,” Port’s frame betrayed discomfort. “It’ll be easier if we don’t see him die.”

“No, Port! I can fix him,” Sunshift insisted, her wings vibrating with emphasis. “We  _ have _ medical supplies. Um,” she paused. “We do have those, right? Like,  _ intact _ stuff?”

A moment’s pause. “Yeah, we do,” Port said begrudgingly. He threw up his hands in defeat. “You know what? Do whatever you want. Just don’t come whining to me when the pipsqueak dies.” He limped back to the cockpit without another word.

Well, okay, then. Sunshift opened the door to what she recalled to be the tiny medbay for the ship. She gently placed the green minibot on the (slightly dented) berth in the corner of the room, and hesitated for a moment. There were protocols, she knew, but Sunshift didn’t ever really remember Chargerender _telling_ her those protocols. As Sunshift recalled, most of her training was just “here, have this patient with _actual literal_ _fingers_ stuck in his spark chamber, no I will not tell you why, hope he doesn’t die under your inexperienced care.”

Well, they didn’t die  _ all  _ of the time under Sunshift’s care-- in fact, they hardly ever did, and she got far better at it the longer she was made to treat these bots. However, even though Sunshift had read almost every single datapad on anatomy that she could, she couldn’t shake the sudden nervousness burgeoning in her spark as she looked at the minibot. Unless she could find some scrap metal, there wasn’t any way that she could seal his spark chamber back up, and he had so many lesions criss-crossing his body, and--

Okay, Sunshift,  _ focus. _ First things first-- get that sharp thing out of the minibot’s spark chamber. Sunshift peered closer at the small thing embedded in the metal, and frowned. Those turquoise tendrils appeared to be  _ originating _ from that object, and they wove around the inner mechanisms of the mech as if they were always a part of him. They looked organic in nature-- in fact, they appeared almost the same as Sunshift’s tiny plant outside. Sunshift pulled a bent pair of tweezers out of a drawer and attempted to extract the metal shard.

The minibot’s spark flared up, a crackling charge stinging Sunshift’s hand as she attempted to extract the object embedded in the sensitive protoform. Sunshift squinted a little bit, confusion washing over her as she released her grip on the thing.

Now that she got a closer look at it, the small, splinter-like object pulsed with the same life as the minibot’s spark. Sunshift decided that it wasn’t a good idea to pull it out, however painful it looked from the outside. She glanced down at the ‘bot and poked his odd looking head. 

That probably wasn’t a thing that doctors did, so she stopped. Now, what  _ else _ did patients need? Sunshift pondered this for about two kliks before she reached the obvious answer-- energon! Duh, he left almost  _ all  _ of it on his tiny ship, because his literal spark chamber was exposed.

She couldn’t see any visible  _ intake _ , so force-feeding it to him  _ probably _ wouldn’t help. Sunshift stared down at the small ‘bot, processor whirling and whirling with the memory of every patient she had ever seen to, every cadaver she had ever dissected. Her fingers twitched.

Sunshift was fairly certain that those green tendrils had been smaller before. She focused her attention on them, astonished to notice that the small things were actually… closing up the minibot’s spark chamber. Transfixed, Sunshift watched as the front of the minibot’s chassis gradually sealed shut, the metal growing liquid, and then gradually solidifying over the course of several kliks.

“What in the pit?” she cried out, forgetting to keep her voice down. The minibot twitched at the disturbance, and Port poken his helm into the medbay. His gaze was turned toward the floor however.

“I told you that he would die,” Port grunted.

“Um, no, he’s not dead, there’s this weird thing inside of him and his wounds just… poof, gone?” Sunshift pointed wildly at the freak of nature on the berth. A freak of nature that  _ she had never read about before _ and that  _ Chargerender never told her about _ ! A new discovery! Sunshift’s spark burned with the possibilities, the theories that could be made--

“What in Primus’ name?” Port’s curiosity had gotten the better of him, and he stared at the minibot, his intake fallen open in shock. “He was practically cleaved open when you brought him here!”   
“I  _ know _ , right? Isn’t this freaky?”

“That is… one word for it,” Port’s voice took on a cautious edge. “We should put him outside.”

“Why’s  _ that _ your immediate solution?” Sunshift cycled her optics as she sifted through the clutter scattered about the tiny medbay. She found the cable meant to connect to the spark monitor (or, at least,  _ one  _ of the cables meant to do that) and began the procedure to hook the minibot up to the screen. She called up the appropriate diagram from the depths of her scattered memory files and gently clipped the tiny sensors into the minibot’s transformation seams. Miraculously, the monitor began to take the ‘bot’s readings after a few moments, beating in time with the pulse of his spark. Sunshift’s wings vibrated proudly. “See? He’s still alive. We can’t just toss him out now!”

“You paid me for _one_ passenger, not _two.” _Port’s intake was twisted into a scowl as he stared at the screen, alive with energon readings and sparkbeats. He seemed surprised that the equipment worked at all.

“Um. I’ll pay you more later?” Sunshift’s optics beseeched Port in that effervescent way-- the one that had helped her convince that one mnemosurgeon to open the door for  _ just one klik _ .

She wondered briefly how that bot was doing.

Port’s steely glare was enough to melt the toughest of armor. He simply turned around, and left Sunshift with her unconscious minibot.

Sunshift pulled up a slightly dented stool, and plopped down right next to the berth. She listened to the minibot’s tiny exvents with fascination, and watched the glyphs on the screen change every couple of seconds. She grabbed a cracked datapad off of the floor and switched it on. 

It was titled  _ “Politics from the Perspectives of Beastformers and Flightframes”. _ Fascinating! Or, at least, it seemed that way. Sunshift settled down, and began to read, her optics every so often flicking toward her patient to make sure that he hadn’t died in the last two kliks.

This doctor stuff was easier than she thought! At least Sunshift had some reading to make sure that she didn’t get bored.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Brightspecs wakes up. Sunshift and Port banter.

The datapad was  _ extremely _ boring. More boring than sitting in her habsuite by herself back at Chargerender’s lab. It was more boring than all of those lecture vids that she had to sit through whenever Chargerender fancied herself a tutor. It was grating and awful and Port kept calling her to the cockpit so that she could hand him a wrench or something dumb like that and didn’t he know that Sunshift had her very first  _ living _ patient? He could be so thoughtless.

Sunshift ended up spending the next several megakliks staring at the green minibot, running back and forth from the medbay to the cockpit and trying to pick her way through dense legalese intermittently. It was all exceedingly dull, except for the parts where Sunshift would watch the lines measuring the tiny bot’s sparkbeat wiggle up and down. Those parts were fun.

Why was she even still trying to read this book? It was mostly just about old bots arguing with other old bots, and that war Port mentioned was also talked about in the datapad with excruciating detail.

This was both convenient, because Sunshift had been curious about it, and inconvenient, because the writer of the datapad tended to assume that the reader had already  _ known _ about the war. Sunshift scrolled back and forth between passages in a bored, casual way as she desperately made a feeble attempt to understand what  _ deeds _ and  _ bills _ and  _ laws _ were.

She was jerked out of her frustrated, fogged train of thought by a small crackling.

Sunshift shot to her pedes, and stared at the minibot as his vocalizer slowly, painfully came online.

“ _ Kkkkkgkkk. KKkksskkdkkkkdkk.” _

_ _ “Oh my goodness!” Sunshift shrieked as a single, yellow optic blinked online. “Oh my goodness!  _ Port, come here— the tiny broken ‘bot is awake!”  _ Her wings waved wildly, knocking some equipment from the wall. Oops. Port could fix it later.

The minibot’s optic shrank in terror as it focused on Sunshift, and it immediately sat bolt-upright. 

“Where—  _ Where am I _ ?” the minibot’s voice was high pitched and edged with static, as if he were about to go offline again. He wrung the claw-like appendages that he possessed instead of proper hands with anxiety, and his now bright optic flicked from one way to the other, as if he were being hunted.  _ “Who are you?” _

“Ohhhh, hi, I’m Sunshift!” Sunshift thrust her hand out in greeting and waited for the tiny ‘bot to shake it. When he didn’t, she retracted the offer in disappointment. “I found you on this battlefield planet, and you were in this box ship that had a ton of others like you-- wayyyy bigger, obviously, and they all looked weird looking too! Why do you look like that? Isn’t it inconvenient to not have hands? Also! You should be dead, by the way!” 

The green minibot stared at Sunshift in bewilderment. “...Dead?”

“Oh, right, sorry, that was rude! What’s your name? I forgot to ask that!”

“What do you mean that I should be  _ dead _ ?”

Sunshift huffed in exasperation. This wasn’t how conversations were  _ supposed _ to go! “You had a giant hole in your chassis and probably should have been leaking energon all over the place, but you weren’t; and there is now a plant growing inside of you.”

“ _ What _ ?” The minibot looked a little bit sick-- or, he seemed that way, judging by how he swayed on his pedes. Sunshift cocked her helm to one side, fully prepared to catch the tiny ‘bot if he ended up falling over. “A  _ plant _ ? That can’t be right, I--”

“Um, I wouldn’t do that,” Sunshift pointed out as the minibot began to claw at his chassis, scoring large marks in his already scratched up, bright green paint. She winced at the sound, and grabbed the ‘bot’s wrists. “I think that it saved your life. It essentially closed your wounds back up.” She squinted a little, observing the small seams where his chassis had sealed together.. “I’m not really sure how that works scientifically. I  _ would _ run a scan on you but I’m not really sure if it will kill the plant-thing and then, by extension, you.”

The minibot was shaking too violently to respond, so Sunshift slackened her grip on his wrist joints. His funny, single optic twitched and flicked about, and Sunshift was almost certain that he was going to blow it up with the strain he was putting on it. 

“It’s that  _ thing _ they put inside of me,” he cried out, vocalizer shrill and static-filled from his panic. “Primus, I can feel it  _ poking me! _ Get it out--”

“It saved your life, dummy,” Sunshift poked his chassis. “Until I know what it does exactly, I’m not going to touch it! I’d rather you be alive and a freak of nature than dead and normal.” The minibot looked like he was about to faint again, so Sunshift grabbed the back of his cowl to steady him. “Do  _ you  _ know anything about that weird… plant thing?”

“N-no,” the minibot cried out miserably. “They didn’t tell me  _ anything _ about it, and I didn’t even  _ know _ what I was stealing. Please don’t take me back to the Senate or to the Syndicate both are awful and they might…” with a shaking claw, the minibot touched his funny, flat-shaped head and recoiled with disgust. “...mutilate me more.”

“What’s a Senate?” Sunshift peered at him with squinted optics. “They made you look all odd-looking on purpose? That’s not very nice!”

“ _ Not nice? They took my face and my hands and that’s all you can say?”  _ the minibot let out a shriek, and his optic sparked.

Sunshift had the distinct feeling that this outburst had been long coming. “Um, sure? Is it that big of a deal?” she tilted her helm questioningly, looking the ‘bot up and down. “Oh, wait, it is. Because you’re about to keel over. So, I’m guessing that the thing you stole had something to do with organic life? Because that wasn’t the  _ first  _ plant I found on this planet, after all, and--”

The minibot’s vocalizer had devolved into incoherent, staticky mumbling. Sunshift escorted him back to the berth, slowly laying him down.

“What are you  _ doing _ in here?” Port’s grumpy voice came through the door, and Sunshift glanced up at her shipmate.

“Talking to the patient! I called you over here earlier but  _ somebody  _ wanted to be mean and ignore me.”

“I ignore you because half of what you say is of no importance.”

“...That’s not  _ unfair _ but proves my point quite nicely. You need to work on your attitude. Do you know how to fix him?” Sunshift pointed to the green minibot, who was twitching and still muttering static to himself. Port shuttered his optics tightly and rubbed the top of his nasal ridge.

“Aren’t  _ you _ the unlicensed ‘doctor’?”

“You’re old and decrepit, so I thought that you would know  _ something _ about maintenance,” Sunshift threw her hands into the air with exasperation. “I know about plants, and I know about cybertronian anatomy, but I don’t know  _ anything _ about what happens when you shove the two together in the same body.”

“Well, maybe you should consult one of your datapads for that,” Port grunted.

“Your attitude isn’t helping! We have to help him,” Sunshift’s wings twitched downward with agitation. “C’mon, Port, why don’t  _ you _ talk to him? You know about the war and stuff, right? I don’t want him to… do that anymore,” she gestured vaguely at where the minibot was twitching. “So… could you?”

Another burst of static came from the minibot’s vocalizer.

“I doubt that he’ll really be up for speaking for awhile after this,” Port said gruffly, and turned to leave the room. Sunshift grabbed his shoulder joint desperately. 

“Port,  _ please _ . I don’t know what to say to him, and I’m no good at calming people down. I think. I can’t really remember.”

Port ex-vented heavily, and strode over to the berth where the minibot was laying. “You.  _ Empurata _ ,” he said to the small mech. “Stop straining your vocalizer and  _ listen _ .”

The minibot stopped moving almost immediately, and his single optic widened in a fearful way. Sunshift realized that Port wasn’t really the best person for this-- in her own desperation, she had failed to remember that he was just as bad at socializing as she was-- and, not only that, he was a  _ grump. _

Oh, well.

“What’s your designation?” Port stared down at the green minibot, his facial expression resembling that of a metal wall panel. Which is to say, revealing nothing.

“B-brightspecs,” squeaked the tiny mech, grabbing onto the berth with both claws, and looking thoroughly intimidated. “I... I don’t remember where I was forged, though. I think that was lost with my…” He gestured vaguely at his weird, flat-shaped helm.

“Hm. You know your skillset? Do you remember that, at least?” Port’s good optic reflected suspicion and cold judgment. “I want to know if it was worth carrying your sorry carcass into my ship and dripping energon all over the place.”

“Um, actually, he wasn’t really dripping energon by that point--”

“Shut up, Sunshift.”

“And I was technically the one to carry him--”

“ _ Shut up, _ Sunshift.”

“Okay.”

Brightspec’s optic flicked from Port to Sunshift and back again. “...I’m a thief, really. Or, rather, I was. I was really good at hacking into lock systems, picking physical locks, fitting into small spaces…”

Port studied him for a moment. “You ever scavenge parts off of a ship before?”

“W-well, no. But I could, probably? I don’t think that it would be that hard,” Brightspecs stuttered.

“Here’s the deal. You can stay for now. We get off this corpse-ridden wasteland. Then I’ll dump you at the nearest waystation, and you can figure yourself out. In exchange, you help repair this hunk of metal.” Port spread his arms to indicate the ship as a whole.

Sunshift stared at Port. “Are you  _ threatening _ someone who just almost died?”

“No, I’m making a deal.” Port glared at Sunshift. “I agreed to take  _ you _ the whole way. You paid for  _ one _ bot: yourself. I will not have any freeloaders on this ship. Besides, all three of us are stuck here. All three of us should pitch in to get off of this sorry graveyard.”

“The last part makes sense, but that first comment was kind of mean,” Sunshift squinted at Port. 

Brightspecs raised one claw. “I sense hostility. Can I somehow not be involved in this, anymore?”

Port glared down at both Sunshift and Brightspecs and whipped himself around to exit the medbay. “You two had better bring back something useful when you are close enough to not going offline to do so.” He limped out, and Sunshift felt sure that she didn’t imagine the wince as he quickened his pace to do so.

Sunshift glanced down at Brightspecs. “Um. Sorry about him. Also, sorry about making you freak out.”

“‘S fine,” Brightspecs mumbled, looking down at his claws. “This is just fairly… new to me. The almost dying and being revived by a plant thing. And the fact that I somehow believe you about that, a mecha I’ve just met.”

“I’m glad that I seem so trustworthy!”

“Well, I  _ didn’t _ say that,” Brightspecs added hastily. “I’m saying that I can… feel the plant you talked about squirming around in my spark chamber. And I can feel that… shard poking me. It’s exceedingly uncomfortable and horrifying and that’s why I panicked.” he shuddered.

“That does sound uncomfortable! As soon as I’m certain that you won’t die, I’ll try to remove it.” Sunshift grinned with her optics.

“Maybe someone who is more qualified could do that.”

“Yeah, that’s fair. I  _ am  _ good at performing surgery, though. Just for future reference.”

“I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.”

“I guess that we’ll both find out one day!” Sunshift’s optics smiled as she looked down at Brightspecs. “Hey, do you like to read?”

“It… isn’t a thing that I’m the best at.”

“Oh, okay then… Do you wanna help me sort these datapads?” Sunshift gestured at the pile on the floor-- less of a pile, and more a mess strewn across the medbay. A giant tripping hazard, to be certain.

“I don’t know if there’s anything else for me to do, so…” Brightspecs shrugged. “Sure, I suppose.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sunshift and Brightspecs go scavenging.

Brightspecs had thought that the battlefield, while it was still in use, would be terrifying. It  _ still _ was but in more of a “corpses strewn about, no sentient life in sight” sort of way. As he walked next to a nearly skipping Sunshift, he tried to shove down the awareness of that  _ thing _ poking him.

It was like an itch he couldn’t scratch-- that was the best way he could describe it, although before this he couldn’t exactly pinpoint what the sensation of itching  _ was. _ He tried desperately to resist the urge to open up his chassis and rip that tiny invader out, along with all of its tendrils; but, judging by what Sunshift had theorized, that could very well end his existence altogether.

Brightspecs much rather liked the idea of being alive and uncomfortable rather than dead. Death was far too huge and… dark for him to think about right now.

“ _ Ooh,  _ Brightspecs!” Sunshift tugged on his arm, which sent him flying toward her, due to her significant size advantage. A strangled, surprised “oof _ ”  _ clawed its way out of Brightspecs’ vocalizer.

“What--what?” he stuttered.

“So, I found this tiny plant organic a little bit ago, and I want to show you because it’s cool! It also kinda looks like the little guy inside of you, I think. Similar coloration!” Sunshift’s red optics beamed down at him. She seemed rather proud of herself. Who was Brightspecs to siphon that enthusiasm away?

“Okay... let’s go see it.” 

He didn’t  _ really _ want to, but the insistence in Sunshift’s expression left no room for argument. He didn’t really know where he’d go if she left him there, anyway. Hide in an abandoned warship? They were going to one of those anyway.

Sunshift quite literally dragged him across the dirt, and Brightspecs could feel gray dust getting into his transformation seams as they walked. He allowed himself a sigh, and turned his optic toward the ground. He might as well save his energy for when he had to inevitably run from a fight, although he wasn’t exactly sure what kind of fight would ensue on this planet-sized junkyard.

“Here we are!” Sunshift pointed at the ground, where an array of severed arms surrounded a rather large plant. It was turquoise in color, and Brightspecs swore that he could see it twitch. “I kind of want to take it with us, but I don’t really know how to take care of organics, other than maybe dumping water on them? I can’t remember much other than that, but I can’t remember  _ a lot _ because I ended up missing a whole war while I was studying with my mentor. Isn’t that crazy?”

Brightspecs settled for nodding occasionally while his mind wandered. He stared at the tiny plant, and how its roots seemingly intertwined with the seams of the arms surrounding it. His claws wrung together as a  _ very bad feeling _ emanated from his spark, making him shudder from his helm to his pedes. Something wasn’t right here, and the shard in his armor seemed to vibrate in agreement..

_ “Grow. Larger. Faster. More. Minds? Extinguished. Set to life. Set alive. Take root.”  _ A voice, venomous and engex-bitter hissed through the air, jerking Brightspecs out of his thoughts.

His optic flicked toward Sunshift. “Did… you say something?” he asked.

Sunshift stopped in the middle of her sentence and tilted her helm to one side. Her wings twitched in curiosity. “I was saying lots of things.”

Well, she was right on that front. Brightspecs also wasn’t certain that Sunshift could make that raspy sound with her vocalizer-- she was much too… emotive for that, he thought. 

“Okay… did you  _ hear _ anything? Like, a voice? Besides yours,” Brightspecs added quickly. 

“No, I don’t think so?  _ Oooo,  _ can I examine your audial sensors?!” Sunshift’s optics lit up with interest. “I’ve never done  _ that _ before! I don’t even know where your audials would  _ be _ , considering you have such an unusual helm! Do you think I could—”

“I’d… rather you didn’t. But… Maybe my processor is a little shot from almost being dead for a lot of megacycles.” Brightspecs hadn’t completely convinced himself of that, but it had to be the only possible explanation. What else could possibly be talking to him?

_ “Soon. Overtake. Become whole. Become one. Take root. Reach toward the sun.” _

_ _ Brightspecs shook his helm, trying to rid himself of the haze threatening to come over his processor. Sunshift had already begun to walk away from the plant, and she waved her arms at Brightspecs, her wings twitching in tandem.

“Are you coming?” she called.

Brightspecs nodded and hurried after. He must have imagined the plant beginning to grow bigger. He needed to distract himself, somehow, particularly from the awful anticipation forming in his core.

“So,” Sunshift said cheerily, completely oblivious to the fact that Brightspecs’ claws were shaking. “You were a war bot, right? Do you know which ships we should start with?” Sunshift swept one arm in an arc in front of herself, indicating the sleeping behemoths either tipped over or half-buried by time and dust.

“I never actually fought anywhere. I was just supposed to...” Brightspecs thought about the plant growing in his system. “Nevermind. Point is, I know absolutely  _ nothing _ about ships. Aren’t you the one with the list of parts we need?”

“Well, yeah, but I don’t know what all of those doohickies are used for.”

“We don’t really  _ need _ to know if we’re just… taking them.”

“Where’s your optimistic sense of curiosity, Brightspecs?” Sunshift sighed dramatically, and pointed at one, particularly huge warship half-embedded into a distant mountain. “We’re gonna go  _ there _ .”

Brightspecs stared at it. It was definitely large enough to eat him, Sunshift, and probably half of Cybertron’s population. Not that ships  _ ate  _ anything, who would believe that? Still, it made his leg joints weak to look at it, with its probably very large guns and other dangerous materials inside. Everything in his being told him  _ not _ to go in there. 

“Do we have to?” Brightspecs managed to squeak out.

“It’s the biggest ship around here, so it probably has  _ all _ of the stuff we need,” Sunshift pointed out. “‘Besides, it’s just as dead as anything else here. I’m ninety percent sure, anyway. I don’t really have any experiences that would be valuable to this, so I’m probably not your best source of comfort.”

Brightspecs stared at Sunshift incredulously. Before he could say anything more, she had begun to take off toward the direction of the warship, her wings practically vibrating as she did so.

“You’re too slow!” she called.

Brightspecs groaned softly and chased after her. He would never do this under any other circumstances, obviously, but it seemed as though fate was leaning toward making his life miserable. He tried to brood about this rather than focusing on the now faraway whispers poking at his attention. 

The two mecha continued walking for several megakliks, Sunshift only ever stopping to rest when she saw an exceptionally mangled corpse. This happened more than one might think, and the gruesome nature of her intense interest passed Brightspecs by the more these encounters occurred. Some bots were just strange, Brightspecs guessed, and he had the distinct privilege of being stuck on a planet with one of them.

Brightspecs sank onto the ground in relief as Sunshift found yet  _ another _ corpse that interested her. He let his tired legs rest and watched as the other mecha first shuttered the body’s optics before even looking at its injuries. Her wings did that weird, waving thing again as she looked at the lesions scoring the corpse’s armor, and she started to babble something about the effects of overexposure to ion beams. Whatever that meant. 

Dazed with exhaustion, Brightspecs glanced at the horizon, where the gradual sinking of the red sun marked the latter part of the day. “Sunshift,” Brightspecs said, “can you tell if we’re close to that warship?” Genuinely, Brightspecs could not tell. His lack of a second optic stole most depth perception from him, and it wasn’t as though he had been conscious for the last thousand vorns, when he could have been getting used to his situation. His empurata was still a fresh, horrific event in his mind, a reminder of his failure. 

Sunshift stopped in the middle of her sentence and glanced up toward the warship. “Not too far! Maybe… one more megaklik of walking? I think?” she rolled the corpse facedown on the ground. 

“Can we hurry the pace? I think I’m about to shut down.” Brightspecs winced as another round of whispering began to pinch the fringes of his awareness. “My legs hurt, and I’m hallucinating.”

“Oh! Yeah, of course!” Sunshift’s optics widened as she hopped to her pedes. “Why didn’t you say so? Here--” Before Brightspecs could protest, Sunshift hoisted him up and began walking once she had him secured in her arms. He let out a strangled yelp in surprise. “Wowee, you’re  _ really _ tiny!”

“...I take offense to that,” Brightspecs muttered, turning his gaze toward the ground. Sunshift’s gait was a lot longer, a lot faster than his was. He realized that she had been holding back significantly for him, a fact that made him marvel that this bot had enough energy  _ at all _ , especially with their limited rations of energon. 

Indeed, after about a megaklik, the two bots reached the titan-sized form of the warship above. Brightspecs stared at the giant cavities dotting its exterior, marvelling at the fact that something this huge could even be touched. The pure scale of this thing rivaled even the skyscrapers of Iacon back on Cybertron.

The illusion of grandeur was shattered, though, when Sunshift dumped Brightspecs onto the ground. He yelped when he hit the ground, and scrambled to his feet.

“Hey!” He glared at her, but Sunshift had already turned her back to him and had begun to climb up the side of the ship toward that giant hole. The ship’s armor was porous, almost, made so by the ceaseless gunfire at it so long ago. Brightspecs stared at Sunshift incredulously as she climbed, her wings wiggling as she tried to keep her balance.

“You’re a  _ flight frame _ ,” Brightspecs yelled up at her. “Just… use your alt-mode!”

Sunshift glanced down at Brightspecs, her optics comically wide with realization.  _ “Oh yeah! _ I  _ can _ do that!” She hopped off of her foothold and shifted into her alt-mode midair, soaring a little bit too high before adjusting her trajectory and zooming into the opening.

Brightspecs heard a sudden crashing noise echoing from the ship’s interior, and a shout from Sunshift. His optic widened, and he began to scramble up the ship’s side as fast as he could. Despite his exhaustion, he managed to climb his way into the ship.

This wasn’t the best course of action, he realized. There was no platform on the other side of the hole, as the ship wasn’t designed to let intruders in after vorns and vorns of inactivity.

Brightspecs found himself falling. He fell for a decently long time before he hit the metal floor with a clang. The impact sent a shudder of pain through his body, and it took several kliks before he even considered standing up again.

“Euuhggghh,” Brightspecs groaned, Slowly, painfully, he hauled himself to his pedes. His legs shook with strain as he did so. “Sunshift?”

“I’m here!” A pair of orange legs, sticking out from the wall, kicked at the air for nonexistent traction. “I’m also stuck! Please pull me out!”

“How did you even manage this?” Brightspecs eyed the plane-shaped destruction in the support beams lining the room. 

“I’m not very good at flying yet. This is my second time ever! I think. I can’t remember.”

Brightspecs grabbed hold of one of Sunshift’s legs with his claws. “Ever? Wait. Were you… alt-mode exempt, or something?” He tugged as hard as he could, and Sunshift wiggled at the same time. She came partially out of her self-made hollow, and her arms were now visible.

“What’s that mean?” Sunshift asked curiously, her voice less muffled now. Brightspecs pulled at her leg again, and she used her arms for support as he tugged.

“Means that you didn’t have to transform, people didn’t have to see what you were in your identification… It didn’t matter. You really don’t know about that? Oof,” Brightspecs grunted as he and Sunshift were thrown backward by their inertia. Brightspecs rubbed his backside and hoped that these dents could be sorted out without too much trouble.

“Well, no? Or, I didn’t  _ remember _ it… I don’t remember a lot of stuff. Like the war. No,” Sunshift paused, looking thoughtful. “My mentor said that alt-modes weren’t good for you, and I wasn’t allowed to shift as a precautionary measure. Or something like that.”

“Your alt-mode is like… walking. It’s a natural thing. You should know, you’re a medical type,” Brightspecs looked Sunshift up and down, puzzlement blocking out the increasingly loud whispers on the fringes of his processor. “We wouldn’t be able to do it if it wasn’t good for us, right?”

Sunshift shrugged, her wings drooping slightly. “I don’t disagree, I just… Hey, where do you think we’ll find this thing?” Her optics brightened suddenly as she pulled a datapad out of her subspace. She pointed at a small, hand-drawn picture of what looked like some kind of engine component. Or, at least, that’s what Brightspecs figured, judging by the appropriate label below it. 

“Well,” Brightspecs stared at Sunshift, further bewildered by the sudden change in subject. “I’d guess that it’s in the engine room. Because that’s where the engine is. And, by extension, engine parts.”

“Oh yeah! Obviously, silly me,” Sunshift barked out a forced laugh. “Let’s go find it!” She sprung to her pedes, as if she and Brightspecs had not been walking for almost a full cycle. She began to flounce down a connecting hallway when Brightspecs scrambled after her.

“Wait, Sunshift!” He grabbed at her arm with a claw, and Sunshift spun around with a more startled expression than Brightspecs had expected. “Um. Can I rest? Sit down?”   
Sunshift stared down at him. “We have to get this done, though.”

“I don’t like staying here any more than you do, but I’m  _ tired _ . Shouldn’t  _ you _ be the one insisting that I rest? That’s how it usually goes.”

The orange mecha considered this. “Yeah, you’re right.” Her optics flickered apologetically as she and Brightspecs walked back to the room in which they started. “Sorry, Brightspecs. I kinda forgot about you almost dying earlier.”

“Lucky for you,  _ I’m _ not going to forget anytime soon,” Brightspecs cycled his optic. “Not something I can do easily. Don’t worry about it.”

Sunshift nodded as Brightspecs plopped down in a corner. She sat across from him, legs stretched out in front of her, wings folding downward as she seemed to be attempting to relax. Her red optics flicked this way and that around the room, uneasy in a way that didn’t seem related to the corpses outside.

“There’s nothing in here,” Sunshift said aloud, and nodded to herself. She leaned against the wall, sending a clunk resonating through the small space. Brightspecs offlined his optic before he had to watch her fidget any longer, and allowed his systems to shut down, one by one.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> An unwelcome visitor.

Brightspecs’ optic flashed online in an instant, and his systems echoed in response to a palpable danger. His vents wheezed as he scrambled to his pedes, helm whipping around as he looked this way and that for…

...Nothing. Brightspecs glanced at Sunshift, who lay on the ground awkwardly with her optics online. Her vents cycled air steadily, unworriedly, unreflecting of Brightspecs’ own leftover anxieties.

His spark chamber _ hurt _. It felt as though someone were tugging the circuits in his chassis, pulling him toward something. Brightspecs glanced at the floor, considering an attempt to calm himself back into recharge. With the new, sharp pains echoing through his systems, Brightspecs couldn’t even imagine trying to relax them into shutting down. 

He spotted the datapad on the floor, where Sunshift had presumably dropped it when she had finally let her optics offline. Brightspecs picked it up, and studied its contents. He left Sunshift a message via frequency, and left the room in hopes of maybe finding a few of the components whilst ridding his muddled processor of those voices from before. He may as well do something useful while he was up.

Brighspecs’ pedesteps echoed through the empty hallways, spooking him with every movement. If this was supposed to be a relaxing endeavor, it certainly was not doing its job. Brightspecs’ body shivered as he peered up and down the halls of this warship, which reminded him in structure of the facility in which his empurata took place. It was easier to push that to the back of his processor when another bot was there. Particularly a very loud bot, with literally no knowledge about what the Senate did to mecha like him. Sunshift’s ignorance about the whole thing comforted and perturbed Brightspecs all at the same time. 

He shook those thoughts away-- or at least, he made an attempt. He switched the datapad on and studied the tiny depictions of the parts that Port needed. Brightspecs could roughly figure out where each one would be, but it would take some aimless wandering to figure out his bearings. He’d never been on a ship as large as this, and never even on a cruiser for more than a few megakliks at a time. 

Aimless wandering it was then. Brightspecs poked his head into the empty rooms as he walked and occasionally stepped around the cavities littering the floor. As he shuffled around one particularly hazardous-looking chasm, he froze.

Brightspecs’ body seized up in terror as something skittered in the distance. Something clinked against the floor. He swore that he could hear slow, painful ex-vents. 

No, no. There was no one in here aside from Sunshift. She was probably just shifting mid-recharge. Very loudly. So loud that it echoed all the way down the corridors. Brightspecs forced his unsteady legs to move to a solid part of the floor. It was fine. It was all. Completely. Fine.

_ “Parasite.” _

A shriek tore itself out of Brightspecs’ vocalizer as he felt something brush his pede, and he tore down the corridor as fast as his systems could carry him. The buzzing in the back of his processor grew increasingly louder, only exacerbated by his outright panic. He hopped over the holes in the floor with abandon. He didn’t even _ know _ that he could jump that far. He shifted into his alt-mode as quickly as he could manage, and swerved around the lacerations. His wheels squealed. He felt energon pounding, rushing through his circuits as he raced away, as far away from that horrid thing as possible.

Brightspecs slowed down, once his processor was cleared of the panic and allowed it to give way to physical tiredness. He shifted back into root mode, and grabbed the wall with one claw as his body threatened to give out. As usual, he was far too jumpy for his own good.

Brightspecs ex-vented, and lightly touched his helm. That impulse was exactly how he got to be like this, how he lost his hands and his face. He shuddered, and tried to push away the memory of his mutilation. He had a job to do.

He reached into his subspace and pulled out the datapad. It was slightly cracked, from being jostled about so in Brightspecs’ vehicle mode. His optic dimmed guiltily as he looked at it. Hopefully, Port wouldn’t be angry about this. 

Brightspecs turned his gaze toward the ceiling, where the crimson sun now peeked through. The corridor was flooded with a red-hued light, and the dilapidated condition of the warship was illuminated with clarity. Rust gathered in corners and along edges, and what Brightspecs judged to be dried splatters of energon covered one wall and part of the floor. A silhouette of sorts sat in the center of the dark pink haze, a clean portion of the wall where a corpse must have sat at one point. Gross.

He did a double take as he was about to walk away. Wait. The corpse. Did it… get moved by scavengers? It must have. A while ago. Never mind the scuff marks on the floor or the marks on the wall where cold, dead fingers must have dug into it.

Oh, Primus. He had to be imagining this, and certainly had to be imagining the continued clank of pedes further down the hall. He shook his helm in a wasted attempt to clear his mind, and scurried back down the corridor. Hopefully, his mind would calm down soon.

* * *

Sunshift woke up to an empty room, devoid of any sound except her own systems. Her optics widened as she stared about the space, searching for any trace of Brightspecs. There was none.

She glanced down at her side and realized that the datapad was missing. Sunshift’s wings twitched anxiously, and she felt around for the device with slightly shaking hands. Where could it have gone?

Sunshift came to the sudden realization that Brightspecs must have taken it. Why would he have gone without her? Did he not want her around anymore? She shook her helm, and stood unsteadily on her pedes. No, she hadn’t _ done _ anything wrong… Was it something she said? She poked her helm into the now daylit corridor ahead.

She didn’t _ see _ any sign of him. 

“Brightspecs?” Sunshift called, voice quivering with unease. Oh, she hated being left alone, especially in a place like _ this. _Especially in a place with giant, empty halls, where she could encounter the bodyguard or Chargerender at anytime--

No. This wasn’t like the facility at all. Sunshift shoved every thought of that horrid place out of her processor and slipped down the hallway. Her wings twitched occasionally as she called out Brightspecs’ name and received only echoes in return. 

She shuddered. He had to come back eventually, right? He literally wouldn’t survive for very long without Sunshift watching over his care. Probably. Because he almost died. Sunshift’s thoughts came in spurts, overshadowed by her panic and disinclination to being left behind.

A heavy pede-step came from behind. Sunshift brightened, and the fog lifted briefly. She turned around, and came face to face with a pair of unnaturally green optics. 

“Hello,” said Sunshift.

The mech in front of her was a ruined mess. Their limbs, their jaw, their halved chassis was held together solely by vines of a turquoise hue, strung together like a fleshy organic’s sinews or the fibrous tissue of the trees Sunshift had read about. Its intake lolled open-- glossa hanging out, limp and useless and long dead. No energon oozed from the lacerations in its body. Vine-like tendrils wreathed in and out of the openings of the mech, occasionally pulsing in a way akin to an energon line in a living mech.

The misshapen mech stared at her, optic to optic. Sunshift stared back, fascinated. How were they still alive? Could they speak? She squinted a little bit, mind racing as she tried to formulate any plausible way that this was possible. The plantlike tendrils resembled those that were in Brightspecs’ spark chamber--

The monstrosity lunged. Sunshift found herself scrambling away, an impulse long in practice from her employ under Chargerender. Her vents hitched as it stumbled closer, jaw creaking and vents wetly shuddering as its pedes scraped unsteadily across the floor. 

As much as Sunshift would have loved to study this mech under better circumstances, she couldn’t help but give into the warnings that her systems gave her. She turned tail and ran, occasionally tripping over her own pedes. The smallest, terrified whimper crept from her vocalizer as she went, her systems refusing to make any louder noises that may attract larger enemies. She felt tempted to offline her optics, just to rid herself of the terror permeating her frame.

Having to scoot around the almost-chasms dotting the ship’s corridor’s didn’t help either; the creature simply used the vine like growths on its back to grab the other side and haul its way over. 

For only the third time in her life, Sunshift made the determination to transform into her alt-mode. She hopped into the air and set her engines alight as her form became sleeker and better equipped for flight. She zoomed down the hallway, scraping the ceiling when she misjudged the ship’s height. She definitely was _ not _ making a tiny, terrified whining noise in the back of her vocalizer as she doddered through the air almost spiraling out of control several times.

This was great!

Sunshift made the attempt to steady herself, tilting her wings diagonally in order to catch more air. The only thing that she succeeded in through that endeavor was crashing directly into the cracked metal ceiling and spiraling downward at an alarmingly fast rate.

Sunshift quickly transformed back into her root mode when she saw the green minibot below and landed right on top of him. He collapsed to the ground with a grunt.

“Are you dead?” Sunshift cried out and immediately hopped off of him. “Please don’t be!”

“‘M not dead, but I do think that I just had several successive spark overloads,” Brightspecs wheezed. 

“Good! We have to run a little bit more.”

His optic shrank in terror. “What? Why?”

“Moving corpse. Reanimated by plants, I think. Friend of yours?” Sunshift, upon hearing the scrape of vines on metal, scooped Brightspecs into her arms and took off again, her processor spinning from the movement. Running away from things was definitely _ not _ something she ever had to do under Chargerender.

“What?” Brightspecs’ voice heightened to a nearly inaudible pitch. “No, I--” He stopped mid-sentence, frame going rigid with terror.

“Brightspecs?” Sunshift kept her gaze ahead, but her wings lowered automatically with soft concern. “Brightspecs, what’s wrong?”

* * *

_ “Parasites!” _

The whispering was so loud, it felt like someone was shouting at the top of their vocalizer straight into Brightspecs’ audials. 

_ “Sun. Circuits. Sun take mine. Dig roots far.” _

He froze, transfixed. It was as if the voices were melded into one, directed completely at Brightspecs himself.

_ “Parasites away. Planet mine. Take dig roots down. Take circuits.” _

_ “Going far, parasite?” _

_ “Not so. Motherplant see you and motherplant _take.”

“Primus,” Brightspecs whimpered, clinging to Sunshift’s shoulderplates for dear life. “Primus, Sunshift, I can _ hear _ it. It’s _ talking _ to me.”

“Really? Can you ask it about how it takes in nutrients?” Sunshift’s pace briefly slowed, and it took Brightspecs rapping his claw against her chassis to get her to move again.

_ “MINE. MINE. MINE.” _

“I don’t think that it’ll answer anything that I have to say,” Brightspecs squeaked meekly. He lifted his helm and stared at the stumbling mech behind them. It met his optics with an uncanny steadiness. 

“Well, you _ understand _ their language. Maybe you can speak it, too? It’s not out of the question-- _ scrap _.” Sunshift stopped dead. Brightspecs turned his gaze back to their front, only to find that their way was blocked-- by a giant, plantlike tendril seeming to originate from below.

“How am I supposed to talk to a _ non sentient organic _?” Brightspecs wailed, beginning to thrash in panic. 

“How is a _ plant _ supposed to talk to _ you? _” Sunshift’s voice was threaded with panic, and her wings shot straight up defensively. “A healthy relationship requires communication on both sides!”

“Are you seriously quoting a psychology datapad? _ Right now when we’re about to be digested by a deranged organic?” _

“Yes! Now, _ communicate _!” Sunshift shifted her hands under Brightspecs’ arm joints, and held him an arms length in front of herself as she faced the said deranged organic. His legs dangled helplessly below him as he stared at the disturbingly green optics of the dead body.

_ “Fertilize!” _ snarled the plant monster. _ “Parasite, motherplant take!” _

A blinding, painful pressure began to spread from Brightspecs’ spark and through his circuits. As he locked optics with the reanimated corpse, that pain only grew, hotter and brighter. He couldn’t look away. The creature stumbled closer. He could only see empty malice in that gaze-- no empathy, no concrete feeling. Brightspecs wanted to empty his tanks right then and there as his processor grew blank from a mixture of pain and abject terror--

_ “Stop!” _He shrieked, offlining his optic. It felt like he was pushing that built up pressure from his spark and through his vocalizer. 

The slow, stumbling footsteps paused. Brightspecs dared to look, realizing that the creature was staring at him with a tilted helm. Or, rather, half-helm. Most of the gaping space that once held metal was held together by teal-colored vines.

_ “Parasite you,” _ groaned the monstrosity. _ “No leaf you. How dig roots?” _

Brightspecs’ optic flicked around the space. _ “No roots. Not parasite.” _ The pressure lessened as he spoke, an inexplicable relief. _ “Need take metal. You no need.” _

_ “Need circuits, need veins.” _ The monstrosity stumbled closer, swaying as the plant holding it together appeared to loosen its grip. _ “Motherplant not like give. You no take.” _

_ “You no need. Plenty circuits. Need bits,” _ Brightspecs insisted, clutching the datapad in his claws more tightly. _ “Then parasite leave.” _

_ “Need parasite circuits,” _ snarled the plant. Bits of metal began to fall away from the corpse’s frame, landing with tiny plinks on the floor. _ “Parasite no leave. Parasite bring circuits. Parasite bring move. Motherplant move to sun.” _ Below, azure tendrils began to punch into the floor, easily bending it to their will. An arm dropped away from the plant. Then a piece of the corpse’s chassis. Then a hand. Eventually, the tendrils landed in a soft pile, squishing under the weight of a softly glowing spark chamber.

“Slag,” Sunshift whispered.

Brightspecs felt a squirming against the inside of his chassis. He became suddenly all too aware of his own organic parts. _ “No. No use circuits. Parasites go now.” _Brightspecs rapped sharply on Sunshift’s arm with one claw to get her attention.

The organic seemed to gather itself up and solidified into a thicker bunch of plant material. The glowing spark chamber faced Brightspecs head on, glaring at him as a grotesque-looking optic would. _ “Parasites go nowhere,” _it said sweetly. 

“Sunshift,” Brightspecs hissed. “Now would be a great time to fly--” 

A squelch resounded from behind them as the giant vine began to expand and contract, gradually spreading toward Sunshift’s pedes and wings. Sunshift fluttered her wings in a panic, her engines beginning to blaze in a bright pink light.

“Okey dok--” Her sentiment was interrupted by an explosion of speed, sending both her and Brightspecs hurtling forward. They knocked into the rising plant in front of them, tearing a piece off as Sunshift gained momentum. 

“Hold on, Specs!” Sunshift shouted, her body shifting into a medium-sized, sleek flight frame. Brightspecs struggled to get a decent claw grip along the sides of her plating, nearly slipping off as they crashed through the ceiling. Eventually, Brightspecs managed to grab hold of the fins protruding from the back of her vehicle mode.

He shrieked as they spiraled into the sky. Sunshift swooped and swerved as she tilted her wings, feeling for the almost non existent wind currents in the dead planet’s sky. Brightspecs offlined his optic, holding on for dear life and praying to Primus desperately.

The telltale sounds of a transformation soon pierced the constant, deafening din of the winds protesting against their trajectory. Brightspecs onlined his optic once the world stopped spinning, and found himself again in Sunshift’s grip. A piece of tough plant fiber clung to the wheel on his left shoulder, and he flung it away with a disgusted sputter.

Sunshift placed him on the ground. “Well, I guess we can try another ship,” she chirped.

Brightspecs could only nod, his processor faint from the constant stream of terror throughout this cycle. There was no way that searching for spare parts, of all things, could become more difficult than _ this. _


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Port is taken.

Port couldn’t count the number of bad cycles that he’d suffered through. Each one was worse than the last. He peaked right before the war started, and probably hadn’t experienced one anything positive since. His entire life had tilted into an increasingly steep downward spiral. He wasn’t happy. 

Despite his reasonable tolerance of awful circumstances, these were atrocious even for him. He was stuck on an abandoned battlefield planet with a broken down ship, an idiotic, wannabe doctor, and a cowardly empurata.

None of those pointed toward the positive for Port. 

_ At least I’m getting paid _ , he mused, welding two wires back into place. He wobbled on one leg as he did so, attempting to keep himself from toppling over while also holding the light on the ceiling above.  _ Though, not enough for my trouble. _

He’d shuttled people around before. Being a pilot during the war, Port knew all of the short cuts and easiest ways to transport clients. It was an easy way to get shanix for engex and gambling and was far better than vegetating on New Cybertron like his fellow veterans. He’d shuttled Cybertronians, humans, and any species one could name from memory. Port had experience in ignoring the quirks of his oddball clients.

This one, however, took the cake. Sunshift was  _ insufferable, _ never ceasing her chatter and questions and Primus-damned enthusiasm for everything. Port didn’t care for optimism, but some people just weren’t enlightened in how the universe could be like he was.

Sunshift seemed to be  _ deliberately  _ ignorant. There was absolutely no way that she didn’t know about the war, or empurata, or the Senate. There was no way that she, able to list of every minor part of the Cybertronian nervous system, (he’d heard her ramble on about it at least eight times) could be so stupid so as to not know about one of the longest wars in Intergalactic history.

Just thinking about it made his tanks start to burn with anger. Port shook his helm, and released his hold on the wires in front of him. They stayed in place, the welding doing its job and holding the lighting system firm. He nodded curtly at his work, reasonably satisfied with it. Once he got the two useless piles of metal off of his ship, he could stop at a waystation and get his shuttle fixed for real, with new parts all around. 

Port allowed himself an ex-vent. Yes, that would be good. Perhaps he could even allow himself a quick stop at their bar and forget about how awful the universe was for awhile. Something had pillaged his rations of intoxicant, and he missed the sour tang of engex flowing through his system, especially now. Especially when things looked especially hopeless, and he was pretty sure that he was going to die alone on this planet, surrounded by an idiot and a coward.

Port limped his way back to the tiny cockpit. It looked far better than it had when they crashed, with most of the components replaced or fixed to a reasonable measure. Port had in fact braved a short venture outside, where he was able to find some of the pieces scattered about the impact site. The corpses surrounding the shuttle were duly ignored, with Port feeling a small flash of relief that their empty, emotionless optics weren’t facing him. He supposed that he had Sunshift to thank for that. 

He sat down in his chair, slightly scorched and dented though it was. He ran one hand along the arm of it. Port supposed that the damage to the ship could have been a lot worse, considering their trajectory and angle. Port certainly hadn’t been  _ incinerated _ in the atmosphere’s heat, although that was little comfort considering the predicament that he found himself in at the moment. He rested his hand on the control panel in front of him, and let his mind wander.

Then, Port heard a sound.

Despite the comments that Sunshift had made about his age, Port could hear just as well as ever. Old protocols kicked into gear as he stood straight up, though it caused a cracking noise to shoot through his spinal struts, and listened.

_ Click. Click. Taptaptap. _

He didn’t  _ think _ that Brightspecs and Sunshift were back yet. No, they couldn’t be. Sunshift would have made a racket and would have yelled something trite about the soil content or the organic life she pretended to find outside.

Did he forget to check on something? Port didn’t  _ think _ he did. He ran through the parts of the ship that would have been damaged by the crash. Then he ran through the much smaller list of parts that  _ weren’t  _ damaged by the crash.

He had checked everything.

_ Taptaptaptaptap. _

Port’s good optic narrowed, and he slowly, unsteadily crept out of the cockpit. 

_ Taptaptaptaptaptaptap. _

There was something wrong with the vents. Port tilted his head upward, toward the dented grate covering one of the air circulation units left over from when Port had to install them for a pair of particularly loaded organic passengers.

Obviously, that had not been worth his time. One, because the shanix didn’t last him a day, and two, because apparently unwanted malfunctions could become evident at the most inconvenient times.

Primus, he’d wanted to recharge for a bit. Oh well.

Port dragged the copilot’s chair (his own was far too heavy and precious to use for this purpose) so that it sat directly underneath of the vent covering. Then, he clambered onto it, albeit with some unsteadiness. He pried the covering off of the ventilation system, and peered in. 

It was predictably dark, as well as empty. Then, what was making that--

_ TaptaptaptaptapTAPTAPTAP-- _

The noise grew louder, until something jumped out and landed on Port’s face. He let out a yell, falling out of the chair in surprise and onto the very lighting system that he had fixed earlier. The wiring tore, and the light shattered under his weight as he struggled to pry this  _ thing _ off of himself.

Eventually, Port managed to grab hold of his attacker and pull it off. It took him a second to process what it was.

It was a severed arm, fingers wiggling menacingly and wrist joint twitching toward Port every once and awhile. Plant matter protruded from each and every transformation seam and finger joint, the occasional leaf or bud protruding from the tough vine twining around the forearm. The rusted innards of the limb creaked as it moved.

Port promptly shrieked (professionally) and smashed the arm into the the floor repeatedly on an impulse (also professionally), over and over again, until the fingers grew to a standstill and a sticky substance began to leak out of the bruised plant tissue, like energon from a bullet hole. 

His intake tasted like bitterness and stale engex as he stared at the thing, ready to empty his tanks on the floor in front of him. 

“For the love of Primus,” he wheezed and scrambled to his pedes. Port ran as fast as his stiff body would allow to the entryway of the ship and threw the arm as far out of the interior as he could. He shuddered with disgust. “Primus,” he wheezed again, just to fill the eerie silence around him. “Fragging  _ Primus _ .” Port’s frame shook, and he put one hand on the wall to steady himself. It was  _ fine. _ He was  _ fine. _ The arm was far away and--

_ Taptaptaptap. _

Port froze.

There were  _ more. _ He whipped around, only to find that three more of the monstrosities were dropping from the ceiling vent, one by one. They fell to the floor with successive clanks and immediately began to crawl toward Port in a frenzy. He stumbled backward, half-forgotten protocols demanding that he fumble for a pistol that wasn’t there. Port had never regretted selling his old blaster more. When the severed limbs reached his hitting range, Port blindly pounded at the floor with his pede, despite how he wobbled every time he did so. He grit his dentae as sharp pain shot up his twisted leg, and the arms continued to crawl toward him, undeterred by his futile attempts at defending himself.

He yelled and squirmed as the arms crawled up his leg, nimbly incapacitating him within a klik. They dug their fingers without mercy into the gaps in his armor, bruising every inch of his protoform they could reach. The ruined joint of his twisted leg was grabbed roughly, immobilizing Port with dizzying pain. His world spun, as he felt something start to thread itself all around his joints, his armor, and eventually his jaw. His vision went turquoise. His awareness went blank.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A plan.

Upon reaching the shuttle, with a subspace full of spare parts in tow, Brightspecs immediately felt apprehensive. He glanced at Sunshift, who flounced toward the entrance with blissful ignorance about the vibe oozing from the area. Something wasn’t right.

“Port’s going to freak out!” Sunshift crowed, optics unnervingly bright, considering the life-or-death situation that the two had just barely escaped. “In a good way. Not in his usual way.” She pulled open the entrance ramp with ease, tugging it toward the ground and then hopping up in what seemed like one fluid motion. 

Brightspecs, not coming up with anything better to do, shoved down his bitter tasting apprehension and followed Sunshift into the shuttle.

Whispers echoed all around him, jeering and laughing and poking fun. They washed over his audials in wave after dizzying wave. It took him a moment to fully register the azure plant matter twining through every little gap of the shuttle.

Sunshift dropped the engine components that she held with a clatter, optics wide in horror. “Port?” she called, voice tilted up high with sudden fear. She glanced back at Brightspecs, who could only just hear her over the cacophony of the whispering organics echoing through his helm. 

“Sunshift,” Brightspecs tried to keep his voice down and steady. “I don’t think he’s here anymore.”

“Where would he have gone? He even said that he didn’t want to go outside! Why would he just leave the ship like this?”

“I think…” Brightspecs paused, attempting to zero in on only one or two voices at a time.

_ “Thread through circuits. Break in struts. Bring package to Motherplant. Motherplant. Motherplant. Parasite ours now.” _

_ _ Brightspecs shuddered at the implication and focused his attention back on Sunshift, with only a little bit of difficulty this time. “I think the, uh, organic things took him. Somehow. I’m not sure how. He’s rather… gigantic.”

“Why couldn’t he have fought them off then?” Sunshift’s optic ridges furrowed fretfully as she stared at the floor. A lighting system, full of wires and the dying embers of hot glass lay there, almost completely overtaken by the carpet of vines slowly creeping down the walls and across the floor.

“Old bot, I guess.” Brightspecs’ legs began to shake as the whispers grew louder, more excited by the moment, _hungrier_ by the moment. He tugged at Sunshift’s arm worriedly. “Um, I think we should _go._ _Now_.”

A succession of small, muffled tapping noises resounded from the ventilation system above. Brightspecs and Sunshift froze, and slowly tilted their helms upward. 

Suspiciously finger-esque shapes wiggled from the square-shaped hole above them.

Sunshift just stood there, transfixed in fascination as an entire severed arm dropped out of the vent, followed by one and then two more. They clambered along the floor toward the two mecha. 

Perhaps Brightspecs was too faint of constitution to handle adventures such as this. Perhaps the shambling plant corpse had done him in. Whatever it was, he let out a shriek, and raced away from the advancing limbs. Sunshift, after another moment of hesitation, followed suit. Brightspecs could hear her engines vibrating in thought once the two had exited the shuttle, and were out of earshot of the plants.

“Brightspecs, this is  _ fascinating! _ ” He could almost see Sunshift’s grin under her mouthplate. She glanced back at the shuttle, optics bright with her characteristic enthusiasm. “I thought that we had escaped the creature, but it looks like it has more than one host! I think I have a theory--”

“Who  _ cares _ about how it works?” Brightspecs’ vocalizer crackled as his frame shuddered with panic. “It just tried to kill us, and  _ I think it killed Port too. _ ” The poking at his spark chamber sent twinge after twinge of pain through his chassis, and he wobbled on his pedes. “We don’t have a working ship and I’m going to die and plants are talking to me, Sunshift.  _ That’s not normal! That’s not something I can do! I can’t get into trouble again!” _

His vision fragmented as hysteria flooded his awareness. There was only him and his emotions and the pain, and he wanted to curl up on the ground and just die.

“No, no, Brightspecs,” Sunshift’s voice, unclear through Brightspecs’ panicked haze, was threaded with concern and alarm. “No, don’t do that!” She bent down toward where he was curled up on the dusty ground, quivering like a cornered turbofox. “You could hear the plants, right? Did they talk about Port? Did they talk about where he went?”

“N-noooo,” Brightspecs sobbed. “They don’t say stuff like that, they just talk about a ‘mother plant’ and parasites and circuits and I hate it and I want this to  _ stop _ !”

He shuddered again. Sunshift gently picked him up off the ground, fetal position and all. 

“I’m not too good at the comforting thing,” Sunshift said, patting Brightspecs’ cowl in a very uncomforting way. “But what you said gave me an idea, I think.”

Brightspecs refrained from speaking, instead opting to let himself marinate in his own anxiety for a bit.

“I’ve read about insectoid organics who share one, singular mental pattern. It’s called a ‘hive mind’, and the insectoids will always listen to the one that reproduces the others. Perhaps this is something like that!” Sunshift mused.

Brightspecs realized that she was running, sprinting away from the vine-covered shuttle. He glanced over her shoulder, realizing that small, suspiciously arm-shaped forms were racing after them at an alarmingly fast pace.

“Maybe,” Sunshift continued, voice unusually steady considering her exertion. “We ought to ‘cut off the head’, as humans put it!”

“It’s a plant. It doesn’t have a head,” Brightspecs choked out.

“Oh, you know what I mean!” He didn’t. “I’m saying that we have to find the source of these organics. And then we have to explode them! With  _ fire. And explosions. _ ” Sunshift said the last part with a little more excitement than was comforting. 

Still, she had a point. “How are we going to find the source, though? There’s a whole planet that we’d have to search!” 

Sunshift stopped running, and ducked behind a particularly large rock. “Have a little spark-to-spark!”

“That didn’t work last time!” Brightspecs groused. 

_ “Pretend to be a plant. _ ”

“Excuse me?”

“Act your plantiest.  _ Be _ the plant. Pretend that you’re a plant stuck inside a minibot’s body and oh no, you have to get this tasty plane to your mother plant, what _ ever _ will you do? Act like that!”

“Sunshift, I’m not really good at--”

“ _ NO OBJECTIONS THIS IS THE ONLY IDEA I HAVE.”  _ With that, Brightspecs was lifted off the ground above Sunshift, held only by her hands underneath his arms. They would have to discuss a more dignified arrangement.

The arms, inexplicably, had climbed to the top of the rock. Sunshift held Brightspecs in front of herself like a shield as Brightspecs opened his audials to the ever-constant humming around him.

Immediately, his processor was almost inundated by the plants’ chatter, their excited whispers. 

“ _ New circuits! More sun. More-more-more-more-kill the parasite!” _

Brightspecs realized with a jolt that, with the source so close, he could differentiate between the voices of the two arms. He steeled himself, hardened his spark.

_ “Hard-shell plant me,” _ Brightspecs allowed the words to slide out, smooth as a cube of engex. Like before, a pressure that he did not notice lightened its hold on his spark chamber. The tendrils in his chassis seemed to slow their movement. The arms in front of him ceased their advance, hands cocked to one side as if listening.  _ “More circuits. Bring to Motherplant?” _

_ _ _ “You kin?”  _ one of the arms spoke with a rasp, which seemed to scratch the inside of Brightspecs’ helm, making him wince.  _ “Fertilizer, circuits host for Motherplant?” _

_ _ _ “Yes, fertilizer… Circuits for Motherplant,”  _ Brightspecs insisted. The vines around each arm shifted, as if convening among themselves.

Sunshift glanced up at Brightspecs questioningly. He nodded at her, and motioned for her to put him down. 

“Are you sure that you’ll be okay with this?” Brightspecs whispered at her. “Being the bait. That was the plan, right?”

Sunshift grinned with her optics. “Well, obviously. How else am I going to study this, if not from the inside of a plant? That’s where all the action is. Don’t worry about me, Specs, I’ve got it covered. Probably. I don’t think I’ve done this before.”

“I haven’t done this before, either. We’re two of a kind, I suppose.”

One of the arms peeked over the crest of the rock, beckoning with its index finger. Brightspecs withheld a shudder, but only barely.  _ “Plant you, come. Bring fresh circuits.” _ it skittered back over the boulder, toward its mate.

Brightspecs shot a glance at Sunshift, who watched the thing move with blissful, intent fascination. His optic flicked from one side to the other out of habit, and he tugged on her arm.

“It wants us to follow it,” Brightspecs whispered. Sunshift nodded curtly, a speck of severity in her optics. The two crept out of their hiding place. The two arms waited ahead, grotesque escorts in the gray dirt. Brightspecs felt a pang of nausea wash through his fuel tank, for what he was certain would not be the last time today. 

_ “Come,” _ said the less abrasive-sounding plant. Brightspecs nodded slightly, gesturing at Sunshift to follow him. The two arms crawled ahead, occasionally pausing as if to make sure that the mecha were still following them. 

The hike was unbearably long, particularly after the countless megakliks taken to find Port’s components earlier in the cycle. Brightspecs didn’t want to risk asking for a rest-- the plant arms didn’t appear to get tired, keeping up the same pace as before, and he didn’t want to blow this for the mere reason that he had short legs.

_ They could have made themselves useful when they performed my empurata, and given me longer legs _ , Brightspecs thought wryly. His frame shivered, and alerts telling him to recharge filled his vision. He dismissed them immediately, and focused instead on forcing his legs to go forward. One, two, one, two.

Eventually, the landscape grew significantly less gray and far more green and turquoise-hued. Plants protruded from the ground, gradually transitioning from a few sprouts to a thousand thicker vines, some spiraling up toward the sky, some creeping across the ground, others still intertwining and overlapping with each other. They whispered among themselves, hungry and reaching as Brightspecs and Sunshift walked past. Brightspecs steeled himself.

“Sunshift,  _ how  _ are we going to kill these things?” he whispered to her.

“Blow them up, I think. If I’m being honest, I haven’t really gotten further than that,” Sunshift replied.

“That really helps me put my confidence in you,” Brightspecs mumbled dryly. 

“Just trust me. Trust. I have a plan. Or, rather, I  _ will _ . Eventually.” Sunshift nudged Brightspecs’ shoulder-wheel in a friendly way, and he startled for a moment. He couldn’t remember the last time that someone did that companionably, rather than in a threatening or condescending way.

He shook his helm, desperately trying to clear his thoughts. The ground no longer felt gritty, relatively flat, and pierced only by the occasional stone; rather it was squishy and soft, giving way under his weight. Horrifyingly, vines both thin, thorns twisting out of their flesh, and thick, lumps and sores covering their surface covered the ground, making Brightspecs shudder in disgust with each step.

The arms forged ahead toward what appeared to be a conglomerate of Cybertronian ships covered in plant material attached together in a precarious, sinister spire. Sunshift stared upward at it, awe clear in her optics. Brightspecs could almost hear the questions about to come rushing out of her intake, expecting no answer but fully indicative of the curiosity bursting from her spark.

He barely heard her start to chatter as they stepped closer to the spire, then closer, then closer still, until it loomed overhead, curving like the surgeon’s knowing grin as he began to carve Brightspecs’ helm open, to gut, to scoop out his brain module and displace it. The spire curved sharp, shardlike and sent foreboding stabbing through his chassis. He latched onto the faint awareness of Sunshift’s words, barely even comprehending them as the vines in front of them split open with a tear and azure tendrils spiraled out from the inside, tentacle-like in every way, covered with claw like thorns. Small, red-hued buds covered the vines, little star-like pinpricks that transfixed him, almost reminding him of beauty if it weren’t horrifyingly, terrifyingly, grotesquely reaching for him at this moment.

The vines dug into the ground and hauled a misshapen, green mass out of the interior of the spiral. Tiny, glowing shapes spanned across the giant thing’s surface, and even could be seen just under the skin as well. With a shiver, Brightspecs realized that they were spark chambers, pulsing and glowing and blazing and still alive. He scarcely even heard Sunshift’s horrified invent as he stared at the bulbous thing. Thousands of voices seemed to exude from it, murmuring, scratching, prodding at his audials, demanding that he listen. They all said the same thing, a single voice formed out of thousands. He felt like shaking under the pure force of the voices.

_ “Bring circuits to Motherplant, you,” _ rumbled the  _ thing _ in front of him.

Sunshift slowly glanced down at Brightspecs, her optics wide. “Specs,” she whispered. “That thing is a lot bigger than I thought it would be.”

“It’s a lot  _ louder  _ than I thought it would be,” Brightspecs desperately withheld from shouting, despite the fact that voices were clawing out his audials until he could barely hear his own thoughts. He grabbed for something to keep himself steady, and ended up leaning on Sunshift’s leg for balance. “See if you can find anything to kill it,” he whispered to Sunshift.

She said something that he couldn’t quite parse out, and quickly backed away, her engines revving as she ran. Brightspecs steeled himself, mustering whatever energy he had left in his frame to look the plant mass in… one of its sparks, he guessed. It didn’t exactly have discernable optics.

_ “Where new circuits? Big one that you take,”  _ Brightspecs shouted at Motherplant. 

_ “Give me new circuits,”  _ Motherplant screamed down at him, making his balance waver. Despite the force threatening to push him over, Brightspecs clamped down on whatever tiny bit of bravery he had left inside of him, and he pushed back.

The pressure building up in his chassis had somewhere to go as he spoke. The shard next to his spark felt white hot as words simply slid, vibrating with their own power, out of his vocalizer.  _ “You tell me where large bot. Now.” _

The image in his head, of Port cocooned in vines, was dragged out of the Motherplant forcefully. His words, like a shovel, scooped the information out of the foreign thoughts with startling violence. Brightspecs winced as the Motherplant screamed, shrill and painful in his audials. He turned and shifted into his alt-mode. 

Brightspecs’ wheels slid uncomfortably along the plant-covered ground, grinding up the soft tissue underneath and in between. He sensed the vines reaching for him, looking to crumple his frame and take it for themselves. With that rather horrifying notion, he revved his engine and sped toward the cocoon he had pictured.

Brightspecs could feel his frame beginning to falter. He had travelled too much, expended too much energy for him to be able to travel efficiently. His wheels swerved in the wrong direction, and his engine stalled briefly. His spark burned, causing nausea to spread through his tanks. His vision swam as he desperately tried to make it toward the violet-hued figure in the distance whose image was slowly being swallowed up by greenery.

He forced one last burst of energy, speeding toward the cocoon and subsequently transforming into his root mode. Brightspecs could barely keep from flinching as pain shot up his legs from his pedes. He reached out desperately, clawing at the tough plant tissue-- it tore with some pressure, ripping away as Brightspecs forced his arms to move  _ just a little more. _

Port’s dim, yellow optics were visible. Vines weaved in and out between the seams in his armor, digging into any and all soft spots that they could reach. Brightspecs swallowed down another burst of nausea, and reached into the space, tugging on the vines as hard as his tired limbs would let him.

Port’s optics snapped online, their depths a blazing, sickly green. His intake twisted into a malice that sent Brightspecs’ processor spiraling in panic as he grabbed Brightspecs’ wrists with an ironclad grip. His vents shuddered as he stepped out of the cocoon, the tissue tearing wide open before him. Brightspecs struggled, the attempt futile against Port’s steady grasp.

Port’s face contorted into that of glee.

_ “Not plant, parasite. Found you, parasite,” _ the voice of the Motherplant oozed out of a place adjacent to Port’s vocalizer, the sickly-sweet cadance rubbing Brightspecs’ audials the wrong way. Desperately, he tried to push Port’s massive frame away, but vines had begun to twine tightly around Brightspecs’ legs, keeping them tied together and him in place. Hunger emanated from the Motherplant inside of Port, and his intake gaped open in an uncomfortable-looking way. Despair injected its sticky poison through Brightspecs’ energon lines, and he trembled. He flinched away as a single, thorn-ridden tendril caressed the bottom of his helm, just below his optic. Half-images flashed past, those of cutting and transplanting. Half-voices echoed, jeering at his cowardice, at his incompetence. He felt the absence of his hands, of his depth perception all the more keenly as the vine slowly started to poke its way into his optic--

Something crashed into the back of Port, shoving him forward and wrenching Brightspecs out of his grasp. The vines faltered, allowing Brightspecs to fall to the disgustingly soft ground. An orange flightframe swooped overhead.

“You’re  _ stupid!” _ Sunshift screamed into the air.

Brightspecs almost felt like laughing in relief. Sunshift transformed back to her root mode, landing on Port’s sprawled out figure. Her optics gleamed with mischief as she pulled a cube of what appeared to be engex out of her subspace.

“What are you doing?” Brightspecs asked her, too dazed to get off of the ground.

“Magic!” Sunshift forcefully tilted Port’s helm toward her, and poured the engex down his throat. His frame shuddered, and in the back of his processor Brightspecs sensed the Motherplant flinch back. Port’s body convulsed, and he unsteadily rose to his knees, before he keeled over and promptly purged on the ground. A glowing, lumpy mass flopped around in the mess, tendrils wiggling in the air.

Sunshift made a noise of disgust, and stomped on it. Green, innermost energon gushed from the form, and it slowly stopped wiggling.

Port groaned and slowly turned his optics away from the ground. His gaze no longer glowed green, only one optic pulsing with golden life. The vines twined around his frame remained but had faded to a pale, sickly brown.

“How in the name of Primus did you know that would work?” Brightspecs stared at Sunshift.

“So, okay, I drank this stuff,” Sunshift indicated the cube of engex, “the other cycle and got _really _sick, and I remembered it and figured that Port could just purge out the plant thing, but then I _also _remembered that Port is a _raging_ _engex addict_ so I added a _bunch_ of drugs from the medbay to the mix to amp the sick factor up a bit so I’m really glad that worked!” Sunshift chirped.

“Out of everything in my miserable life, that was the worst thing I’ve ever experienced,” Port groaned.

“You’ll probably get sick a few more times. I put some  _ gnarly _ substances in there.”

The vines below the three shifted-- the movement was slight, but all the more noticeable to the already unsteady group. Sunshift grabbed the mass that Port had purged and shoved it into her subspace. 

“Let’s go!” She cried out, her wings wiggling. “Let’s go blow this plant up!” She held her hands out to the prone mecha.

Brightspecs chose to ignore the utterly disgusting actions that Sunshift had just taken and used Sunshift’s hand as leverage to pull himself to a vertical position. Port hesitated, before accepting her assistance. He wobbled on his good leg, and his intake quirked downward in pain. Brightspecs ex-vented in relief to see that familiar frown, rather than the out of character smirk forced by the Motherplant.

A tearing sound interrupted that sense of relief as a half-dissolved hand burst out of the plant-covered ground. Another burst out, and then another, digging its fingers into the soft ground. Port turned to Sunshift.

“You’d better have a  _ really good plan.” _


	8. Chapter 8

Port crouched in the cramped space below one of the defunct ships. With his hands slightly shaking, he snipped wire after wire. His processor raced as he worked, running through diagrams and experience and the embedded memories in his circuits. His tanks churned, most likely exacerbated by the laced engex that Sunshift forced down his throat.

The memory of the plant wriggling through every crevice and seam on his frame threatened to break through his concentration. Port occasionally looked down at himself, simply for the visual reassurance that no more vines were squirming into the protoform beneath his armor. He could almost feel them there, in his hands and scraping the inside of his helm with commands that he couldn’t deny. 

Port gently pulled a black and red wire out of the engine that he had in front of him and heated his index finger to fuse it to another. This was the key to Sunshift’s plan, the very idea of which sowed doubt among the fringes of his thoughts. 

He bent a protruding piece of metal from the engine and pulled another wire out. The generator next to him was a messy pile of scrap but nonetheless functional. He connected the two devices together, methodical in his movements. Port could barely stave off the memory of doing this during the war, when he had been trapped with his crewmates and they had to fight off Decepticons…

Port shook his helm in an attempt to jerk the thoughts out of his processor. This wasn’t doing him any good. All he could do now is admire the work he had done-- considering the circumstances it wasn’t the worst job that he had pulled off.

“Pooooort, are you finished?” Sunshift called into the belly of the wrecked ship. Port choked down the annoyance threatening to bloom in the pit of his chassis and held up his ramshackle device. As a makeshift ion blaster, it wasn’t half bad.

“Yes,” he called back up and began his unsteady journey back to the surface. He hauled the heavy device behind him as he limped, realizing immediately that there was no way that the other two mecha could even lift it.

What a bother. Port rubbed the top of his nasal ridge in exasperation. Eventually, gradually, he finally limped out from underneath of the ruined cruiser, scrap metal weapon in tow. He hoisted it over one shoulder.

“When I connect the two wires together, the blast should be hot enough to resemble an ion pulse,” Port narrowed his optics. “We have one chance, so you had better not have been wrong about this.”

Sunshift nodded with a touch too much enthusiasm. “No, I’m about fifty nine point six percent  _ certain  _ that I’m correct. Organics can’t normally come into contact with so much energon, so these plants have to be  _ feeding _ off of it if nothing else! And if they feed off of it, it’s gotta be rushing through them. So much concentrated in one area should make it go  _ boom _ .”

“I will choose to trust you. On this one thing  _ only _ . My deposit of positive feelings toward you is running rather low,” Port grunted, “If it ever existed. What exactly are you planning to propose as a backup plan?”

Sunshift flicked her wings at him dismissively. “Doesn’t matter if we’re about to die! Are you ready?”

Port nodded curtly, and he limped after Sunshift as the two peeked around the corner of the abandoned ship. Brightspecs sat on the ground, his exhaustion evident in how he slouched, in how his shoulders sagged and how dim his optic glowed. He glanced up at them, body quivering.

In the distance, there was only green and turquoise and azure. Tendrils rose from the enormous mass gathering from the expanse, the tiniest pinpricks of light scattered through the monstrosity.

“Oh,” Brightspecs looked remarkably ill, despite his lack of a traditional face. He stood on his pedes, wobbling and subsequently grabbing onto Port for balance.

“Distract it for a second,” Sunshift urged Brightspecs, one hand on his shoulder-wheel for comfort. “Port and I have gotta get into position.”

The tiny empurata only gave the smallest nod in response, his optic becoming unfocused and far away. He slumped to the ground as it did so, imperceptible noises being expelled from his vocalizer.

If Port hadn’t been possessed by a literal plant barely one megaklik ago, he would have claimed that Brightspecs was ill in the processor. With something like plant possession under his belt, Port found himself willing to believe far more than before.

Sunshift’s optics sparkled, hopping in place with her continued excess energy.

“Now--  _ physical distraction! _ ” Sunshift transformed into her alt-mode, shooting into the sky. Her wings wobbled as she soared above, toward the disgusting mass in the distance. She hovered above for several seconds, during which time Port assumed that she was yelling her vapid ideas of insults at the organic.

Port sighed heavily. The nausea in his tanks only increased as he stumbled up the side of the wrecked cruiser, setting the ion blaster on top of it as securely as he could.

Sunshift darted through the air overhead, pursued by the nimble tendrils rising from the mass. Port’s vents sucked in a burst of air as he watched-- if the explosion was as big as Sunshift claimed, it would surely hit her as well.

Flashes of war dug their unbidden claws into the forefront of Port’s processor-- he remembered yelling, demands of sacrifice, his own determination, and then, ultimately, failure. His hands froze in place.

Something far away nudged him, gently pushed him back to the present. Something comforting put its metaphorical hands on Port’s shoulders and whispered reassurance into his raw audials.

Port snapped out of his stupor. He aimed. He connected the loose wires. He fired.

The kickback pushed him off of his perch. He landed on his back and lay there for a few seconds too long, too long to see what occured in that bright, blinding flash of pink light in the distance as the energon detonated.

Sunshift had been  _ right _ .

The realization was more paralyzing than the pain shooting up his twisted leg. Port made it onto his knees before he purged another round of tainted highgrade out of his system, his frame shuddering as the explosion echoed overhead. Next to Port, Brightspecs lay curled up, his claws clamped over his audials, his body shaking, letting out small, silent whimpers that were drowned out by the explosion far away. 

“Primus,” Port rasped, and scrambled to his pedes as quickly as he could. Upon scanning the sky, he caught no glimpses of an orange flight-frame.

He bent down and purged again, tanks churning and churning from nausea and oh Primus, someone else was dead because of  _ him, _ and the explosion still echoed in his mind, even though silence had long blanketed the planet. This brought back memories of a still body, blaster-fire in the distance, empty optics, and he was going to be sick again--

“You guys don’t look so good,” Sunshift said behind him.

Port started violently, having to put one hand on the ship to keep from falling on the ground. “What the--? I thought that you  _ died _ .”

“Nah,” Sunshift chirped, wiggling her left wing, which was crumpled and useless, the engine having been torn off. Energon dripped from the cavity at a steady rate, gleaming blue. “I got knocked backwards  _ super far _ , and then I kinda crashed ‘cause I’m bad at flying, and now I’m here!”

“How did you get back here so quickly?”

“I ran, of course!” Her optics flashed him a grin, before Sunshift turned her gaze toward Brightspecs, who had passed out at some point. She bent down, and gently scooped him up with gentle arms. His frame flopped about as she did so.

Port watched this silently, the solar panels on his back shuddering as he desperately fought the pain rolling through his frame.

“I guess we can take our time getting back, for the most part,” Sunshift laughed weakly.

“We better, or my leg might fall off.”


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The end - for now.

The trek felt as if the group was sloshing their way through a thick swill of resistance, the like of which Sunshift couldn’t necessarily identify. It took an entire cycle to cover a distance that had scarcely taken she and Brightspecs as long to complete by half.

That had, of course, been a case of urgency-- and Sunshift, with her boundless energy, had not found it depleted, as of yet. To conserve energy, Brightspecs continued in his recharge cycle. Port claimed to never tire, although his leg clearly bothered him-- Sunshift made a mental note to take a look at it later. The warning in Sunshift’s vision, one that warned of her imminent shutdown due to under-fueling, had been blinking for almost the entirety of the cycle. Port occasionally had to stop and retch, frame attempting to purge without any fresh fuel being present in his tanks.

Sunshift was closer to giving up hope than she ever had been-- she never ever did that-- when a familiar shape became clear in the distance, a hypothetical beacon in the dark. Her spark eased with relief, and Sunshift tightened her grip on the minibot in her arms one last time as she and Port headed toward the ship.

She almost collapsed when they entered the hatch, but managed to stay as steady as possible as she placed Brightspecs down on a medical berth. The air smelled mildly of organic decay, brown vines hanging down from almost every wall. Sunshift ex-vented in relief as she found that the medical equipment was relatively untouched.

She put one hand on the wall, focusing on the feeling of rough metal on her armor. S _ tay steady, Sunshift, _ she told herself. Her wings twitched as she heard Port’s limping gait enter the tiny medbay. 

“Here,” Port grunted. Sunshift turned around, antennae perking up when she noticed the cube of energon in his hand. Her greedy hands grabbed at the sustenance before she realized what she was doing, and Sunshift downed the entire cube in barely a nanoklik. Sunshift offlined her optics momentarily in bliss, imagining that she could feel herself growing brighter as her tanks filled.

“Thanks, Port!” She onlined her optics again and beamed at him. “You saved some for yourself and Specs, right?”

He nodded curtly. “Yeah. I don’t need as much as you.” He turned his gaze toward where Brightspecs lay on the berth, still unconscious. “He going to be okay?”

“Yeah, I think so. He was just overworked in the past few cycles, that’s all. Plus, I think the plant thing is kind of… draining.” Sunshift patted Brightspecs’ unconscious form. “We might want to find a real doctor to take a look at him--  _ and  _ you. There’s only so much I can do, I think.”

“Another stop, then.”

“Are you opposed?” Sunshift blinked at Port with wide optics.

Port made a snorting noise. “Better pay me extra after this whole ordeal.” The solar panels on his back, extended for the first time since she had known him, flicked upward. Sunshift grinned underneath her mouthplate.

“Sure, sure.” Sunshift glanced down at Brightspecs’ still form, and proceeded to connect the appropriate wires from the monitor onto his frame. As the screen flickered on, Sunshift’s frame sagged in relief upon finding that he was stable-- almost normal, even. 

She didn’t want to scan him, necessarily, since the plant connecting his frame together was still an unknown variable. Disconnected from the leftover threats, Sunshift let her mind wander into hypothesis, conjecture, questioning. 

“I wonder what caused the growth in the first place,” she murmured. “It has to be the same type of plant as that which attacked us, I should think. Does it feed on energon, like the motherplant? It must, since its host is Cybertronian...” Sunshift allowed herself to jabber as she worked, making notes of Brightspecs’ condition and what she remembered about Port’s. She would get him in here eventually. For now, Sunshift sensed that he wanted to be alone, at least for a time.

* * *

A wire here, a component here, a bit of metal there. Port let his mind sink into the quiet around him as he began the last bit of work to get the ship running again. He had found the needed components dumped on the ground in the entryway and owed that particular mess to Sunshift and Brightspecs’ haste when they found the shuttle empty. The work was monotonous enough that his processor slowly began to wander.

People did things for a reason. Did Port have the right one? The thought prodded the back of his helm in that annoying way, in a way that nothing had since the beginning of the war, when things besides drinking and shanix had occupied his processor. He welded two circuits together. His thoughts continued, a steady stream of wires connecting and poking him. His tanks churned, and the clink of a bolt being dropped sounded oh so much like a pile of shanix--

“Port, do you need help?” Sunshift poked her helm into the cockpit. Port cycled his optics in annoyance-- although the exact emotion was far closer to a mockery of the former than anything else, to Port’s surprise. 

“I was over there less than a klik ago. Don’t you think I would have asked then if I did?”

“Um, no? You’ve been holed up in here for three megakliks, or at least I believe so-- my chronometer is still functioning, unlike my wing, and also I might have used up a little more than half of your metal patches for my wounds and also Brightspecs’. We’re gonna need more.”

“I see.” Port swallowed down the annoyance threatening to surface, and let his shoulder joints relax. “I was lost in my thoughts, I suppose. Could you tear down the organics that are still infesting this place?”

Sunshift saluted him-- albeit in the wrong way, with the wrong hand, in the wrong stance-- and disappeared out of the cockpit.

Port glanced down at his work, and nodded, satisfied. He had been so consumed with his own conflicting emotions that he had not noticed that the engine had almost been completely fixed-- forgoing a few finishing touches, that is.

If there weren’t any more interruptions, the tiny ship should be off of the planet within two cycles.

And, for the first time in a millenia, Port almost felt calm.


End file.
